BEE SEASON

Three years ago my wife and I pulled into our driveway and just as we were about to get out of the car my wife grabbed my arm and pointed. Hovering over our car some thirty feet in the air was an angry black cloud of bees, probably fifty thousand of them. We could hear them from inside the car, and it wasn't a buzzing but a deep thrumming, a low electric sound, like a power line.

I've seen that bad movie so like the pansy I am I backed my car the fuck up and drove it around to the other side of the house where my wife and I could sprint into the house squealing like the terrified children we were/are.

Three phone calls later and a man shows up, dressed in a bright yellow hazmat suit carrying some sort of vacuum cleaner type deal. He proceeds to fill a very large bag with bees, focusing on getting the queen and removing her from the premises. My wife is extremely PETA proud but at that moment if the bee guy had told her he was going to take out the queen with whatever cruel and unusual method bees hate the most, she probably would've tipped him an extra twenty bucks to do it quicker.

The vacuum cleaner did the trick, however, and afterwards we knocked open a wall in our porch and pulled out an enormous beehive which had been built inside. Free of the terrifying bees, there was an air of sadness to the whole affair, and the various pieces of broken hive reminded me that in this story I am Legend, the Omega Man who hunts and kills mercilessly and yet considers himself not monster but persecuted victim.

But I'm sensitive like that.

So we've been bee-free for years and whether or not that's a good or bad thing for the ecology of my own little biosphere I can only say what is what.

But recently I have this:

Every morning for the last few months I walk out onto my driveway and find it covered in dead bees. Not a few, or a dozen, but hundreds of them, curled up on the concrete directly under my porch light. I know they're attracted to the light at night, I see them buzzing around there when I take the dog out. But some time between then and morning something wicked this way comes and I have no idea what it is.

Of course there's a rational explanation for this, and I've heard the cell phone theory and a few others, but finding hundreds of dead bees on your doorstep every day tends to get a body feeling apocalyptic. I fear a bee death cult, and a very determined bee Marshall Applewhite leading thousands of others to their demise wearing the tiniest of black bee Nikes.

Why the bee death cult has picked my house is currently unclear but surely my fault. More than likely (and certainly more than once) I have not thanked the correct authority, or bent my knee to the proper idol. I cut sugar out of my diet two months ago and lost some weight, but in the last week or two certain stressors have caused me to revisit an old friend (breakfast pastries) and make a few new ones (waffles and beer). I'm sure there is a curse attending those actions, but I've been fat before and it never brought a rain of dead insects down upon my land.

If I didn't make it clear before I've always been afraid of bees; it's not just the stinging but the hive mind that freaks me out. Is it that they actually think the same thing at the same time, or is it that they communicate with the queen so quickly it's as if they're of one consciousness? Either way and with apologies to Alice Krige it scares the fuck out of me.

So it's even weirder when I consider the thousands of bees who have made their way to my home recently in order to buzz around my light one last time and die. Surely if there's something specifically deadly about my house, something murderous to bees and all bee brethren, surely if that's the case at least one or two of them could get word out to the others to stay the hell away from me. I'm sure what happened three years ago is legend in the bee community--if my bees were relocated as promised then it's certainly part of the larger Bee Diaspora; and if the guy in the hazmat suit was full of shit and he killed my fifty thousand bees then surely their names are written on some wall somewhere so the other bees will Never Forget. In any event, if the bees are harnessing the horsepower of the hive mind like I think they do, then it is inexplicable why they would ever venture near my property lines.

Still, they do. And they pay for it. Every night. So maybe something takes them by surprise and they don't have a chance, or even lures them in with some carnival barker's promise of a resurrected Queen. It's Los Angeles, after all. Shit like that happens all the time.

Our city is nothing if not dramatic. She will not be ignored or left off the front page. We have earthquake weather and droughts and storms of fire. These recent days I look through the haze to the Hollywood sign and all I see is the Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes and wonder if we're already living in the Forbidden Zone but nobody's told us.

Instead of pilot season it's plague season. The power-mad and the craven and the greasy quisling fat from the king's scraps huddle nightly to plot their next incantation. Perhaps the bees are just the first wave. There may be frogs next. Or locusts. I recall reading of cattle-death, and darkness. But this is ultimately a battle for the firstborn, and the concrete scar we call our River teems with orphan baskets thrown over the wall in a last desperate attempt to save our babies.

There are those who would burn our city to the ground, scorching the earth to smoke us out. They would have us believe the fire is ours, that we are the masses of our own destruction. They would have us believe this but we do not. The tremor in the city is not a tremble but a quickening, and I choose to read the bees at my doorstep as a sign and not a curse. Our numbers grow, in the streets we move as one. For this is not a planet of apes but a city of Infinite Monkeys. And if there is a hive-mind at work it creates, it honors sacrifice and does not destroy. The red you see is the bloodmark we've written on our doors, protecting our children from a wrathful God. The sound you hear is not a buzz but a thrum, like a power line, or a chant. And all the pharoahs hiding behind their walls should hear it loud and clear:

Let my motherfucking people go.