"Can you believe it", I said to myself out loud as I hurriedly swiped the right side of my neck strongly with finger tips and nails.
I was standing yesterday on the seventh rung of my 8 ft. orchardist's ladder, balancing myself by by bracing my shins on the top 8th rung as I picked green pittosporum foliage from a crinkly leaved bush in our back yard. Secateurs in my right hand and foliage in my left until it was enough for a bunch when I would put a rubber band round the stripped stems at the base and throw it to the ground, then start another, I was aware of a buzzing noise somewhere inside the pitto bush. How come there's a blowfly about in the middle of June I thought straight away. It sounded not quite right , like a plane with a sick engine.
Within a second, there was a thwack on my neck, and the unmistakable realization, at least to a beekeeper, even before the pain of the sting is felt, that I was under attack. There's a micro second between the thwack and the stinging pain. The secateurs were quickly transferred to my mouth and I scratched the bee and the sting from my neck. If you do it quickly less poison is pumped in and the pain is minimal.
AS I'd approached the bush with my ladder I had thought about the nearby beehive, the memory bank is very good at recalling painfull experience, and a couple of years ago I came under severe attack at that bush and had to put on a veil to determinedly finish the job. There's something aromatic about that crinkly pittosporum when you disturb and strip leaves from the stem and it smells a bit like perspiration. But this time in the middle of June in this cold spell I assumed it was too cold for bee flight and I would have no trouble. Wrong! I checked the thermometer at the house later and it said 11C. Either a solitary guard bee had sacrified it's life or a brave old forager had been passing and become enraged at the scent of the pitto. It was probably the latter, old bees fly and often die in the field or outside the hive entrance, to leave no work for the hive. And guard bees usually bring other guards with the pheremones from their sting.
But that's the sort of run I'm having lately. Stung in the neck by a bee on the 14th of June. It reminded me of that truck driver sleeping under a bush by the side of the road in Peru in the dead of night, held up for hours at a road block. He was pissed on by two tourists who'd come 10,000k's and spent thousands of dollars, to be held up for hours on day one with nothing to do but drink cerveza and walk off in the dark to take a pee.
