A Life of Comically Calamitous Close Calls: Selma, California (February 2023), Part Seven A (an updated version of a 2023 account)

Victor Davis Hanson

I have lived on my farm for the most part of my 72 years. In all of them, I have lived amid pollinating orchards—plums, apricots, pears, and now almonds.

These species required dozens of rented beehives at bloom.

In the last few decades, perhaps the Africanized hybrid strains seem a bit more aggressive than the European bees of my youth. With the neighbors’ orchards, there are probably 200 hives within a 1/4-mile radius of the house. Getting stung is then frequent.

I would imagine in my evening walks that I have been stung some 200 times, or perhaps at least twice a year during the spring two-week bloom.

Farmers get used to it. My grandfather used to say the stings he suffered while irrigating helped his arthritis. The sting of an occasional solitary wasp or hornet was a bit worse, but not terribly so.

From all those episodes, I never had anything more than a welt and an occasional tiny rash. I note that when I started developing bad allergies suddenly in my fifties, on various skin tests the bee venom box was always checked at the highest level, but of course I ignored it, knowing better my own history (foolish, I know, especially when in the last few years the stings caused a day or two of discomfort).

But when the beehives are sequentially removed, hundreds are abruptly orphaned. The orchard blossoms turn to leaves, and the bees dry up.

In the refugees’ final hours (can they survive a week or two without a hive?) of their angry death throes, hundreds turn up in the yard for a last hit at your flowers’ pollen. Any dripping faucet attracts dozens. So do eaves out of the rain or sun.

Recently, I was stung in the orchard. I can recall five times. Probably more. So what?

However, I noticed for the first time in my life that on each occasion the welt got just a little larger, lasted a little bit longer, and began to have minor secondary effects beyond the minuscule stinger site: a half-day of malaise, a slight fever, a nagging headache, a bout of transitory fatigue. But nothing serious or worth even noting much. After all, in 2022, I was stung three times on the arm while walking and finished the 2-mile trek, took an Advil, and ignored it.

Until February 2023.

I was out early in the yard, picking up debris after our now routine violent California rainstorms. (So much for Gavin Newsom’s “permanent drought.”) Everything was soaked, and the winds knocked over lots of umbrella stands.

A wet outdoor carpet had blown off the deck onto the lawn. I bent over, put my hands underneath it without looking, picked it up, and returned it to the deck. Then I felt a slight prick. A splinter? An ant? A thorn?

Maybe an unstrung thread from the carpet? Who cares?

An insect bite? An unseen wasp or bee hiding for shelter in the carpet coils? A spider? Who knows? Who need worry?

I saw no culprit.

Given an unusual pain, however, I went on thinking it was either a splinter or tiny stinger, given I saw a sort of something inside my small finger. Oddly, it began to hurt within seconds like no bee sting I had had in seven decades. A hornet? A yellowjacket?

I ignored it.

In five minutes, my small finger was larger than my thumb.

I ignored it.

In ten minutes, both arms were suddenly bright red.

Ignored it.

In fifteen minutes, they were covered with welts.

I ignored it. (Reader, yes, I agree this was foolish.)

In twenty minutes, my body, nearly from head to toe, was turning red. I tore off my clothes and found some old lotion to rub on. It worsened the itch.

In twenty-five minutes, my ears were plugged, and my throat was getting swollen. My sinuses clogged.

Hmmm, no problem, I thought. After all, it has been half an hour, and I’m just having a reaction, but to what, really?

Some mere hornets, a lone wasp, a wannabe ineffectual bee?

After all, again, bee stings this season were mostly innocuous on at least five occasions.

But then, in a moment of panic, I remembered that four years ago I had gone to the ER in Tucson after having fainted just as I was about to deliver a lecture with something similar to these symptoms (after having been prescribed Levaquin for a sinus infection).