The Bees

Fall semester, sophomore year, Vassar College - I think it was October, 2000.  One of those perfect-weather Saturday afternoons, nothing really going on.  I think we were planning to play some Wiffleball in front of the dorm later on.

Matt, Paul, and I were in the two-room triple Paul and I shared with another buddy.  Paul and Matt were playing Super Smash Brothers out in the big room; I was in the little room bullshitting on AIM working on a paper bullshitting on AIM.  I hear the sanity-sucking sporadic buzz of insectile wings against a window.  It's a bee; since it's worked its way into my room, I kill it.  About five minutes later, I repeat the process.  I shout into the next room: "Guys, I just killed two bees in my room."  The reply: "So? You scared of bees?"  "No, it's just a little weird."

When a third bee meets its doom for the crime of tapping against my windowpane, I reluctantly shove up from my desk.  "I'm gonna go get some Raid."  Paul and Matt recommence the teasing - oh, Sally's afraid of a couple of bees, yadda yadda blah blah.  But I think something's up.

The Stop-n-Shop run takes about fifteen minutes minimum.  When I get back, one of the freshmen in our hall is standing outside the dorm, looking perturbed.  "Your roommates are running around the dorm screaming about bees," he reports.  "I know, I just got some Raid," I reply.

He looks dubiously at my selection of three different types of insecticide.  "You're gonna need a bigger can."

I climb the stairs to the third floor, east hallway - my happy Poughkeepsie home.  Before I've opened the fire door, I hear them. Adam, my other roommate, has arrived; he and Paul and Matt are literally screaming.  Not just whining, not just flailing about like the dorm's on fire and the only exit's blocked; they are incoherent and panicked and screaming.

"Bees, Dave!  BEES!"  Matt shouts, gripping my arms.
"I got the Raid--"
"Forget the Raid! We called Buildings and Grounds.  You were right - just - just...  Go see.  Bees!  Go see, but be careful!"

So I venture into room 320, through the big room into my little single.  I hear the expected buzzing - what I didn't expect was the darkness in my room.  Didn't I leave the light on...?  I look up.

My overhead light is completely obscured by the cloud of bees on the ceiling.

I duck out of the room and back into the hallway.  Matt and our freshman pet were right - the Raid is useless.

The Buildings and Grounds guy shows up. He's grizzled, compact, and possessed of a reassuringly grim focus.  As we point the way, we note the contents of his hip holster - two industrial-sized spray cans.  He goes in and shuts the door behind him - I half expect him to utter the old "If I'm not back in ten minutes, call the cops" line.

We decide to wait outside, and that's when we see the true scope of this insanity.  The cloud of bees in my room is just the beginning: an entire hive's worth of the little bastards hovers outside our corner of Olivia Josselyn House, waiting their turn to terrorize the triple.

The final tally of the massacre is unknowable.  The hive was destroyed, but only after a second visit from Vassar's much more hardcore answer to the Orkin Man.  The true cost, however, was in the trauma we suffered that day.

Matt and Paul roamed the dorm, shellshocked, until their respective girlfriends found them and held them close like little children who'd just learned the Bogeyman was real.

Adam spent the rest of the weekend in a friend's room.  In another dorm.  Across campus.

I borrowed the dorm's vacuum and began removing evidence of the carnage...but that was the task of months. Bee carcasses continued to turn up long after the initial cleanup phase was completed. I kept finding them in sectors I thought I'd cleared - which was an occasional drain on my mojo. ("What's that?" "Oh nothing babe, just a bee corpse, pay it no mind...wait don't put your shirt on...where are you going?")

Of course, all three of us got rip-roaring drunk that night...at someone else's place.