Watch: A Cautionary Tale About Transporting 3,000 Live Bees In A Truck
Fate does not like to be tempted, like a slightly brash aunt with access to a free bar, it has very little self-control. When fate sees an act of hubris, a decision with the potential for astounding comic consequences, fate will extend it's intervening hand to engineer as disastrous a situation as possible.
When I tell you that a man was transporting 3,000 live bees in a box beside him in his car, you assume that at some point, the bees escape, because of course they escape. There is no world where the cabin of that man's vehicle does not fill with 3,000 live bees. Of course the bees at some point, rise as one, and fill that man's vehicle with their angry buzzing and his own molten terror. That car, could only ever have ended up being FULL of bees.
"Houston, we have a problem!" A beekeeper takes a dangerous drive home when some 3,000 bees broke free from their containers in his truck, swarming all over the cab.
He was reportedly not stung the whole ride home. https://t.co/cOYbfatXYW pic.twitter.com/DNHOBAdNGQ
— ABC News (@ABC) May 5, 2018
One imagines that when the cabin of your car fills with a swarm of 3,000 bees, like some kind of very localised biblical plague, a certain degree of pessimism may overcome your thinking. You may imagine what might happen next, the sort of havoc that that many loose winged insects could wreak. Perhaps they will fly around all angrily, obscuring your view of the road and cause an accident. Perhaps they will gather round you and co-operate to drag you back into the box as a sort of offering to their queen. Maybe they will work together to overpower you, knowing that, not having a stinger of your own, you are powerless to retaliate, and they will seize control of the vehicle with some taking over the wheel and some working the pedals, and commandeer your vehicle to a supermarket and force you to empty your bank account and spend all your funds on honey. At the very least, you expect to be stung.
'The girls are out'. He calmly declares, like the principal of a female-only primary school surveying a break-time. 'The girls are out,' is what he says. This is a man who has taken the sexual education metaphor of 'the birds and the bees' far too literally. He presumes girls and bees to be one and the same. Bees, once they hatch from their eggs, become girls, that's just science.
The composure exhibited by this man, this nameless truck driver who had the tenacity to transport 3,000 live bees in a box that was evidently nowhere near as secured as a box full of 3,000 live bees ought to be, is astounding. If this man can cope with the presence of 3,000 live bees in his car, and what's more, they can live in harmony; he and the bees can co-exist, is surely the greatest sign that there is hope for humanity, hope for the co-existence of seemingly disparate and opposing forces. This man and these bees, are a symbol of the brighter future we've all hoped for, but a future, with far more bees than we ever could've anticipated.