Random Childhood Memory Time - I Used to Play with Bees

Let me start off by saying that I was a brave and stupid kid growing up. 

My Dad did a lot of work landscaping our property at our old house. We had beautiful flower gardens, ponds, etc. In our front yard he planted these tall purple flower bushes that attracted massive amounts of bees. 

So what did I do nearly every spring and summer growing up? Catch bees. Not with a net, or any other sophisticated bug catching device. But with Tic-Tac containers. And I wouldn’t just catch 1 bee in a Tic-Tac container. I would try to fit as many of those suckers in a container as I could. I could “safely” get 3 in a container. My record was 5, but it was too cramped for the bees. 

As for my releasing technique - I would loosen the cap just until it was barely closed, and then throw the “bee bomb” into my neighbor’s (The Cat Lady) yard. I would do this repeatedly until I got tired or there were no more bees to collect. That’s right. I would do this for so long that the bees would stop pollinating the flowers for the day. 

I had one mishap that could of ended my bee-catching career. I came up with this brilliant idea to take an empty betta fish tank (which I didn’t have the top for) and place it upside down on the side walk. The plan was to catch 3 bees in a Tic-Tac container and release them into the tank by carefully lifting the tank up and transferring the bees into it. I was going to see how may I could get in the tank. Well I had about 15 angry bees in the upside down fish tank, when I was about to make another deposit. I sat down on the sidewalk, opened up the Tic-Tac container, lifted up the tank, and then tragedy struck! Clumsy me knocked over the tank. I quickly laid down on my back as my mini swarm of bees flew right over me and off through the neighborhood. It looked like a Blue Angels flyover! They got so close I could feel the wind from their wings on my face. The only lesson I learned from all this was that an upside down fish tank is not a good bee receptacle. 

I blame this behavior on the fact that there were no children my age on my block.