The Killer Bees — A Cautionary Tale

Once upon a time, killer bees attacked the Medireview Kingdom of Vespucci. Countless citizens were attacked and killed without apparent rhyme or reason. The King of Vespucci declared a state of emergency and called out the army, equipped with swords, shields, spikenards, crossbows and cannon. Soldiers searched carriages for killer bees and detained, indefinitely without bail, passengers in whose effects bees were found. Pilgrims returning from abroad were sharply interrogated lest they had been bribed with honey to carry killer bees back to Vespucci. Judicial hearings, rules of evidence and the right of habeas corpus were suspended. Accusing speeches were made against bees throughout the kingdom, against their ungainly appearance and unseemly noise, and citing their undoubted envy of the entrepreneurial genius of Vespuccians.

Meanwhile, killer bees kept coming and the King kept mobilizing, with ever larger and more lethal weapons, including catapults and warships with cannonades. "This is war!" said the King. "No holds barred! We'll bomb and burn them back to the Stone Age!" Bomb and burn they did, with benign beehives destroyed throughout the kingdom. Beekeepers were arrested as potential traitors and held without charge. Other kingdoms were warned to do the same or risk Vespuccian bombs. "Those who harbor killer bees will be treated as killer bees," said the King ominously.

Not surprisingly, killer bees, now multiplying by the thousands, paid no discernible heed to Vespuccian rhetoric. Still larger war appropriations were made by the King, this time with funds drawn from workers’ Retirement Reserves. "Sacrifices are necessary in war!" said the young King, with favorable echoes from his youthful court, their own retirement decades away.

One day the Chief Palace Astrologer said to the King, "No disrespect, Sire, but why don't we find out the source of hostility in the killer bees? With a generous royal grant, our alchemists might find an antidote." The King declared this rampant nonsense. "What is there to find out," he asked, "except that killer bees are killer bees? They only want to sting Vespuccians, whom they doubtless envy for our humanity, yes, our humaneness. On second thought," said the King, "take your grant and see what you can discover."

Court alchemists went to work in their cauldrons. Horoscopes were cast for Vespuccian royalty and queen bees. Linguists finally broke the code for bee-language. Findings, seer-reviewed and double blind-tested, were copied by hand into the illuminated journal, Medireview Nature. Alchemists found that killer bees were "allergic to Vespuccian pride and arrogance," with "inherited memories of bee exploitations and exterminations."

"How could bees be allergic to pride and arrogance of another species?" asked the King, pacing the court and shaking his upraised hands. "You say they are irritated by some ancestral Crusade against Bees centuries ago? And irritated by displacement of bees, you say, caused by the planting of a wasp colony in the middle of centuries-old bee territory? Anyway, that was then. This is now."

"We too are dismayed," said the chief Vespucci alchemist, "but that's the way it seems to be. There is no known antitoxin, so the only long-term remedy would be to somehow neutralize the sting of the killer bees. Frankly, Sire, catapults and warships won't help."

"How then can we neutralize the killer-bee sting?" said the King.

"Perhaps, Sire—and meaning no offense—by giving killer bees less reason to sting us. What if we dropped nectar-rich flowers on them instead of bombs? What if we honored their bee-art (those glorious, hexagonal honeycombs!) and bee-culture (a buzz so musical!) and even bee-religion (what-flies-will-fertilize)? Further, Sire, kindred strains of bees are more likely than we to shame killer bees for their attacks and to control their extreme behavior—something like tying up their own pit bulls."

So it came to pass that spikenards, catapults and flaming arrows were put away. Retirement funds of aging workers were restored. The King, admonished by his own father for his bellicose language, dropped his incendiary metaphors of "vengeance" and "crusading." Civil liberties were partially restored through efforts of the Vespuccian Civil Liberties Union, yet they were never the same again. Enduring Vespuccian fears of vulnerability to new strains of killer bees led to tighter immigration policies, armed carriage drivers, suspects held without charge or due process, and court monitoring of all mail and banking transactions.

Once bee-language was understood by bio-linguists, messages of mutual respect were delivered to killer-bee headquarters. Killer bees unable to restrain their hostility were rounded up and quarantined until their stingers could be removed.

The killer-bee invasion of Vespucci ceased, and so did the need of killer bees to sting Vespuccians to death. True to a future Darwin prediction—since they were no longer needed for survival—venomous stingers in killer bees dried up and disappeared, until future generations had no stingers at all. Vespuccians and killer bees had learned at last to bee-have.

The author invites comments on this article. You can write to him at 144 Gillies Lane, Norwalk, CT 06854; or send email to <zharper@optonline.net>.