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Let's hear it for the bees

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    Let's hear it for the bees

    Bees are mega.

    Let's burn down the banks, smash the aristocracy, deport the police, and turn the prisons into giant beehives, making sweet honey and pollinating the plants that will turn England green and pleasant once more. We've had our go and we fucked it. Let's hand it all over to the bees.

    BEES! BEES! BEES! BEES!

    #2
    Let's hear it for the bees

    You were never a fan of wasps, however, as I recall.

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      #3
      Let's hear it for the bees

      I like wasps. But we have an understanding not to inhabit each others' spheres. When one of us breaks those rules, steps are taken.

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        #4
        Let's hear it for the bees

        Bee facts.

        They flap their wings 200 times a second.

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          #5
          Let's hear it for the bees

          No they don't

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            #6
            Let's hear it for the bees

            My dad used to keep bees. As a kid growing up he used to have hives on an estate in a nearby village, and then also some in the new forest for heather honey. If he was away, I used to have to tend the nearby ones, which basicaly consisted of making sure they hadn't been knocked over, and to swap the combs. This wasn't too onerous but my apiary exploits were not something I divulged to my friends, laving two noticeable emotional scars on my upbringing.

            1. The estate was bought by Andrew Lloyd Webber who not only let us continue keeping the hives on his land, took an active interest in it. I would sometimes see him away from the estate, which would cause confusion with whoever I happened to be with, as out of nowhere, we would be approached by Britains leading musical composer, be greeted on first name terms, then asked how my bees were, before continuing on our way with the minimum of update.

            2. My dad was constantly trying to use up the honey. His part-time marxist principles, combined with heroic lethargy, meant he never got round to selling it. This meant every single meal time we would be greeted with the same suggestion "you know what would go well with this, a nice spoon of honey". I fucking hated the stuff and i'm pretty sure he wasn't too fussed about it but everything had it added; cereal, curry, full english breakfast, glasses of water. Everything.

            Fortunately, he went away for a few months and the small hive we had in the back garden, one day swarmed and set upon my brother in law, who up to that day had no knowledge that he was alergic to bee stings. In the three days he was in hospital, we moved the hive from the garden. When my dad got back, he also got rid of his other ones.

            So nowadays, when a bee or wasp suddenly appears in a room, and women start screaming or blokes get angry because they are hovering around their pint, I still don"t think they have put in enough leg work to earn the right to really hate bees.

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              #7
              Let's hear it for the bees

              Wasps - (hurrrgh!) - what are they good for?

              Ask a grown up!

              Don't like that grown-up? Then try this one.

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                #8
                Let's hear it for the bees

                The thread title has given me an awful Deniece Williams earworm.

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                  #9
                  Let's hear it for the bees

                  Now Big Boobs and Fire! has mentioned it, Andrew Lloyd-Webber looks a bit like a bee. He's certainly not 100% human.

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                    #10
                    Let's hear it for the bees

                    Actually, i've now remembered a third traumatic incident.

                    Every couple of years my dad would exchange the bees he had in the new forest with the ones he had in Burghclere, which he did by moving the hives. This meant four round trips to move all of the.

                    A couple of weeks after passing my driving test, my dad announced that I would be accompanying him by taking my mums car.

                    So we loaded the hives into the cars and headed off down to the New Forest. Halfway down the A30 I heard a clunk and didn't think much of it until I noticed a few bees buzzing around the car. Then a few more, and a few more, until it was obvious the comb shelf was dislodged and the bees were free to leave the hive as they wished.

                    By now my dad was a few cars ahead and this was before mobile phones. I also didn't want to stop and get out as the bees were likely to swarm and escape. So I did the only thing I could think of which was to don my protective gear and keep driving. Fortunately, the bees did swarm and on the rear drivers side window.

                    This was on a summer saturday and as it was pre-M3 days, there was the inevitable five mile queue round the Winchester bypas. This meant crawling along, stop starting, for an hour and a half, so that everyone in the outside lane got a fine view of what was going on.

                    What made it worse was that I had never invested in proper bee-keeping gear. I'd either borrow my dads or would improvise with a pair of goalkeeping gloves and a fishing keepnet over my head. The problem with that was it just looked like a bloke in Uhl Sport Bundesliga Pro, a black poloneck with a Shakespeare mach XT tucked into the net.

                    More was the concern that there was a blanket over the hive in the back so it couldn't be seen, so it just looked like I was taking the bees out for a nice Summer afternoon driver.

                    I couln't open the windows for fear they would escape, didn't put the fan on for fear of upsetting them, and was wearing jeans and ski jacket to protect from stings. Add to that the hottest day of the year and I sweated away half of my body weight.

                    Eventually I reached our destination, my dad having got there some time earlier, and saw me arriving dressed like a sports direct fettish party. He clicked what happened and sedated the bees with some gas before getting them back in the hive and into position.

                    I then had to drive back with the car still stinking of the gas, but I considered it the less tortuous of the two journeys.

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