A trip to find the Killer Bee...

The trip started out much as you would expect any other African Adventure to, setting out before dawn, hurtling down rough dirt roads for ten hours in a beaten up old bakkie, narrowly avoiding oncoming traffic and wildlife, and having teeth peridoically shaken out of your head. This was not however, the kind of civilised African Safari that one might see in a 1940's movie. Here there were no khaki covered gentlemen smoking pipes with elephant rifles slung over their shoulders, gazing respectfully over the plains at a pride of lions.

Oh no, on this expedition there were no gentlemen, only one young university student, ill-advised in the ways of the African plains, and one weathered old man of the bush (above), ill-tempered as his partner was ill-advised, unhappy at the prospect of a ten hour journey, less happy still at what lay at it's end.

For this was not a trip to see the grand game of Africa, the cheetahs streaking across the Serengeti or the ponderous Giraffes leaning down for a closer look, but rather to find and bring home the one deadly African animal that no-one is interested in photographing, or even observing from the safety of a Land Rover. We were looking for the Killer Bee.

What seemed like a mildly entertaining concept in the planning stages became harsh reality ten hours down the road. With the local beekeepers (above) halfway between laughing and issuing serious warnings about death at the hands of these bees, the gravity of the situation quickly became apparent. I obediently suited up in my beesuit as instructed, and quietly thought I'd be safe enough if I just followed their lead...
I have many failings in life, and one of them is overconfidence at inappropriate times. This was one of those times. Dancing around like the Queen of the god-damned Faeries, I laughed in the face of the these so-called "Killer" Bees. Ha! Killers! You can't even get through my suit! Squashing them at will, I cried "Who is the killer now little bees?". With their tiny carcasses falling like the patter of rain at my feet, the joy of battle flowed through me. I was invincible, the pinnacle of evolution! With my superior technology I claimed dominion over all living things. I was a god to these soulless invertebrates...
At some point in my megalomanic ravings some bees found their way into my suit. The three centimetre buffer zone between veil and flesh is not the best place for killer bees to be really. The sweeping pain of multiple stings quickly made me realise that the tables of dominion had suddenly turned, and the gods had deserted me in my time of greatest need. Reaching my hands to the heavens I bellowed "What on Earth have I done to deserve this?". As my hands moved skywards the last few crushed bee corpses fell to the ground and I realised that perhaps this wasn't such a violation of Karma after all and I shut my mouth. The problem I had though, was that there is literally no escape from a situation like this. The killer bee has earnt its name because it does not content itself in simply shooing a honey thief away. The killer bee will chase down its target and sting it until it drops in a twitching mass, and even then will sting a few more times just to make sure.
So when one has bees in one's bonnet so to speak, it is not simply a matter of retreating to an area away from the bees and letting them out, because in so doing one would be letting eight million others in.
So, all that can be done is to let the bees sting and hope no more get in. And that is more or less what I did, though I may have wimpered a little at times. Letting that happen can give you a face like this though...and that is more or less what happened.