22nd April 2009, my garden.

A benign nuisance, that’s what I am, I think, to the insect kingdom.

I came home, looked out the window, and saw all these butterflies on the daisy bush. The bees were there too, as usual.

These butterflies are really fast; they are fast like flies. They were jumpy, and I couldn’t get near them. The bees were indifferent, like they always are. I thought, perhaps the butterflies will get used to me like the bees did, or perhaps the bees indifference to me will put them at ease. Whatever, they did seem to settle down.

It was interesting – sometimes a bee and a butterfly would land on the same flower; they’d just each move off and continue on. They had the same attitude with my camera, if it bumped into them, or they bumped into it.

Dad told me a story once. He was in a paddock, with a bunch of workmates. There were bee hives scattered about. His workmates were all a distance apart; 25 to 50 metres or so. One of the men accidentally knocked over a hive. A uniform buzz went up with all the bees, across the paddock. Within seconds each man was attacked by the bees nearest to them. Dad reckons, the bee hives were too far apart from the tipped hive to hear the buzz, but that all the bees reacted at the same time and in the same way. The guys away from the tipped hive didn’t know why they were being attacked until later.

I remember when I was a kid, we used to stick big crackers (small explosives) into this beehive in a tree. After the explosion, the bees would chase us for hundreds of metres, each of us running in different directions. It always amazed me that the bees were actually after each of us individually – they didn’t just forget after 50 metres or so. They knew it was us who caused the evil. And evil it was. I used to always get caught, when I had to slow down to clear a six foot wooden paling fence – that’s when they’d get me.

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