Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     When the bees got out in the old days, it stung the whole neighbourhood into life. And when the bees were finally pinpointed - miles away, perhaps, in the next farm’s chimney or sauna attic - people always saw it as ominous: why was it their attic the bees had got into?

     Then there was that Astronaut, stalking in his stiff suit, hot after a buzzing ball of bees while all the rest of us, you bet, kept well out of it, asking ourselves how many stings you’d need before you were dead. For a boy, all that was the stuff of Odysseus and the Sirens’ song.

     The upsetting thing about bees for little boys was their mad hurry - the idiocy of their toil. And their style of government: not much of a lesson there in egalitarianism! They all sacrificed themselves, like fools, for the queen. It was gruesome. Yet somehow it wasn’t like Hitler, something reprehensible, but something natural and right. We all tried to conjure up in our minds what a drone’s life’d be like and despised it.

     Something of the bees’ flower-to-flower principle attached to beekeepers too. What a lark! Some fancy-free rural Don Juan, playing the part of apiarist, would allure women with honey tea - pretty irresistible, that.

     Imagine this apiarist: a friendly, husky sort of fellow - just the type we imagine a drone to be. When swarming starts, he scoots up on his scooter, buzzes into a house - where he knows there are women - and tells them a swarm’s got lost. Can he go upstairs, he begs, and peep about. Maybe they’ve got into the attic, or the kiln chimney. As he pokes about up there, he keeps going on about all the wonders of the queen’s attraction: he diddles, in fact, women with nothing much to do into feeling they’re some sort of queens themselves. Give me a buzz, he says, if there’s any sign of a swarm. At the neighbours’ perhaps.

     The women rise to it, they take the suggestion to heart. All sorts of buzzings they keep hearing - they even ring him up without reason. Then when the time’s ripe, he buzzes into their yard, this drone, on his Vespa. Of course he cadges a cup of tea and digs his honey pot out. Sometimes he may even secrete a queen into the house, so that a swarm’ll definitely turn up, just where he wants it. And then the women’ll feel the powers of nature are really stirring. Then he sits down to the honey tea. How, in the midst of all that boozing and smoking, can a woman resist?

     Sometimes the men try to pay him back, but sooner or later they get stung - by a wasp or a bee - and no one is in doubt: it was the drone’s doing.

     Then, one day, at one of these honey teas, he seduces a young deaconess. The poor girl gets so distrait she’s soon seen wandering among his beehives, naked, at night, trying to provoke the bees to sting her in punishment. And then she’s found - run down, poorly, her face swollen like a football, and barely alive.

     Now it’s the women who are out to pay him back. They lure him into a kitchen: they choose the young mistress of the largest house, tempting him with fresh teacake and telephone calls. And when he turns up, bearing his honey, they all leap on him. They stuff a broomstick through his sleeves. They tie it to his wrists, as they used to do in the olden times. So there he is, forced to walk along like a scarecrow. They rip his trousers off; they smear him all over with honey. And it’s summer: the kitchen’s full of flies. In a flash he’s furred over with them; and when he’s pushed out onto the highway, the housewives start shrieking with laughter, as they watch him going along with his retinue of flies.

     That’s how the women punish him, with their own bees: the flies.

     But does the apiarist give a damn? He doesn’t mend his ways. Threatened with the same treatment all over again, he retorts that his bees’ll come without question and drive the flies away.