Free Trauma Farm by Brian Brett Page A

several weeks. It was a curious experiment. Since Sharon is allergic, I kept a jar of bees in the spare bedroom in our barn. I’d lift a bee out of the jar with tweezers and hold it against my skin. The rush was brutal, especially by the time thirty barbs hung like tiny fetishes from my knees. The adrenalin would speed up my metabolism, pounding my heart against my chest, my skin alive with sensitivity, and I’d leak an awful-smelling sweat that enthusiasts claim is the body’s toxins oozing out. Then, in several minutes, the stings would deliver their second poison-injecting pulse. After fifteen minutes I’d remove the stingers. They slid out easily if I got the angle right. I’d sit and gaze at the water jar where I crushed and drowned the doomed bees (a bee doesn’t die quickly after releasing its sting), and I’d feel overwhelmed with the sadness of the world. During the next days my sweat ceased to stink, and I found myself more energized. I lost weight. The pain in my knees went away. However, after six blessed weeks, the arthritis returned, so I ended the treatment, but I decided to purchase some bees anyway. I guess you could say I’d been stung.
    For too many people today bees are scary. There is something about tiny, crawling, stinging creatures that instinctively repels us. Seals are cute; bees, spiders, wasps—we squash. Yet through a microscope, or in a close-up photograph, they are lush, brilliant, seductive creatures— as beautiful as tigers and flamingos.
    The life of the hive, like much of farm life, is female. Males serve for stud service or slaughter. In the hive, every worker can become a queen—if she is fed royal jelly—but one suffices. Multiple drones hatch in the spring. Big and useless, they roam around like bumbling bachelors, enjoying the run of the combs, living in luxury, sometimes moving unrestricted from hive to hive, awaiting their glory moment. The young queen will make several preliminary flights, scouting her kingdom, perhaps to remember it for the dark years within the hive that lie ahead. Then one day she will leap out of her hive and take to the air, releasing a jet trail of pheromones, emitting a chip-chip-chip sound as she lunges for the sun. So loud is her cry, so strong her odour, males will find her from ten miles away. Those that fly the highest and fastest will reach her in the “drone zone,” a hundred feet above ground. Obsessive beekeepers claim they’ve heard the snap of their tiny genitalia as they break away from the queen and tumble to the ground, ripped apart by their one act of copulation. Sex and death with altitude.
    Once is not enough for a queen. She will accept several drones, ensuring the genetic diversity of the hive, each one having to lunge higher and harder in the ecstatic nuptial flight, lushly described in Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee, perhaps the most romantic passage on natural history ever written. After the nuptial flight, she returns triumphant, trailing her lovers’ genitalia like streamers, and the failed drones revert to their old bachelor mode, mumbling about the hive while the female workers grow more annoyed with them until, in what’s known as the “summer slaughter of the drones,” they are evicted. Some will fight bitterly, uselessly, as the relentless females shove them out of the hive, suicidally stinging them to death if they resist, heaping up clumps of bodies on the landing and tumbling them down into the waiting mandibles of wasps.
    For thousands of years the Americas thrived without the honeybee. Pollination was accomplished by bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees, stingless bees, and other insects. Mesoamericans learned how to extract some honey from varieties of bumblebee. Then, only a few centuries ago, Native Americans gazed in horror at a sky full of “stinging flies.” The arrival of a honeybee swarm meant that white colonialists were not far behind, eager to seize and change the land.
    Now in