Tuesday, June the 7th, 2005

back to: title, date or indexes

hear this 

Killer Bees : The Mystery Solved

See how we move so easily from birds to bees? Some people think that Hooting Yard is compiled in some vague and random fashion, the ordering of items being based on whatever springs into Frank's pea-sized but pulsating brain from moment to moment. Ha! If only it were that simple. So abstruse is the underlying system, rumours are flying about that Dan Brown's next billion-selling blockbuster could well be The Hooting Yard Code, in which connections, patterns, and inexplicably deep twaddle are to be found between this website, the legend of Prester John, Atlantis, the moon landings, Blunkettgate, and Rosicrucianism. It is all there, if only you know where to look.

Where was I? Bees. Killer bees, to be precise. Pansy Cradledew, who is tirelessly enthusiastic about researching such matters, has stumbled upon the solution to the mystery of killer bee attacks. She was reading that tremendous book, the original Chambers' Book Of Days, which has been lauded here before, and came upon this:

“It has been shewn in a contemporary publication, that it is customary in many parts of England, when a death takes place, to go and formally impart the fact to the bees, to ask them to the funeral, and to fix a piece of crape upon their hives; thus treating these insects as beings possessed of something like human intelligence, and therefore entitled to all the respect which one member of a family pays to the rest. Not long before penning these notes, I met with an instance of this feeling about bees. A neighbour of mine had bought a hive of bees at an auction of the goods of a farmer who had recently died. The bees seemed very sickly, and not likely to thrive, when my neighbour's servant bethought him that they had never been put in mourning for their late master; on this he got a piece of crape and tied it to a stick, which he fastened to the hive. After this the bees recovered, and when I saw them they were in a very flourishing state—a result which was unhesitatingly attributed to their having been put into mourning.”

Pansy sees here the key to the antisocial behaviour of killer bees. Unlike what happened with the lucky hives in the quoted passage, most bereaved families in this day and age forget to include bees in the mourning process. If you doubt that, try to recall the last time you saw a grief-stricken relict tying a piece of crape to a stick and attaching it to a beehive. As this sensible practice has died out, so millions of bees, deprived of the opportunity to mourn their human pals, are thrown into dangerous neurotic confusion. Bereft, ignored, and not even given a piece of crape on a stick, let alone counselling, they are unable to achieve closure and thus band together into swarms of homicidal buzzing frenzy, with predictable—and catastrophic—results.

Pansy will be presenting evidence to a joint panel of experts on funeral arrangements, bereavement, and bees in the near future.