My father kept bees, and it terrified me. Perhaps it was some shameful regard I had for him manifesting in how I saw the creatures. He did not care for me, and he showed me little more than disdain throughout my childhood. He barely spoke to me, though the harsh glares and the terse dismissals hurt far more keenly than the sting of the switch when he had the servants discipline me for indolence or insolence or whichever transgression he decided must have brought me into the room with him in that moment. It was my being there, I now understand, which was my true sin. The wound still aches occasionally. I still think it cruel that a father should so resent his son’s presence, though I’ve come to understand his reasons better.
In any event, my terror at his diminutive livestock was certainly not empirical. I never earned their ire, and they never stung me, but I maintain it was quite rational.
“Stay away from the hives,” Mother would warn me when I ventured into the yard while Father was away. “If you bother them, they will sting you.”
She frequently mentioned the servant who, when I was very young, toppled a hive by accident and perished thereafter in agony. I worried that if the creatures were as irritable as Father, even catching sight of those ominous, thrumming boxes would put me in danger. But I know there was something more. I would encounter lone bees and wasps hovering about the flowers in front of our house, and though I took the same care with these solitary specimens, I felt none of the visceral fear in approaching them that I did in the apiary. A bee was just a creature to me. Like me, in a way, with needs and fears and priorities. But the buzz–the swarm–was something else. All of those needs, all of those fears, all of those bodies. It was chaos. It was too much.
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