To Eat A Bee Or Not

To Eat A Bee Or Not To Eat A Bee,

That Was the Question

For 17 years, large dark carpenter bees have lived in, and munched on, my porch. They shamelessly make baby bees by buzzing around in clumsy clumps. Son three Malcolm named the bee species “Big Black Eyeballs.”

The Eyeballs and I have long done battle. Thrift-store tennis rackets have diced many, the 25-cent-per-corpse bounty kept the kids trying. Others are congealed in caulk I injected into their holes while wriggling on my back under the porch among the cobwebs, cockroaches, and pointy rocks.

Some offspring always return; many this year. A survivalistic friend harvested a few for breakfast one recent hung-over morning, fried them in butter, and offered me one. Never thought I’d eat a bug unless starving, but in this case it was to be instantly manly. Not bad, nutty with a sweet aftertaste. He decided that if we mass market them as a snack, they will sell better as “Big Black Guy Balls.” Exotic, erotic, and low sodium. Surely that crunchilicious exoskeleton counts as fiber, too.

%$#@!

Ground level franchising opportunity, low start-up.

Let us pray that someday this is the actual state of the U.S. DOD (“Department Of Defense”). Funny, back when it was for defense they called it the War Department.

%$#@!

 

Up The Creek Without A Can Opener

Actually Malcolm and I were at a lake, and luckily had my half-assed toolbox.

Camp fires were outlawed everywhere except at the official campgrounds, so we broke with tradition and paid. The outrageous $16/night gets you a concrete picnic table and a steel fire ring, big whoop. Too windy for a fire anyway, so 16 bills down the out-house.

After we told the deaf old camp host we were not fishermen, he proceeded to tell us all the different ways folks’d been catchin’ ‘em. Power bait on jigs, night crawlers on the bottom, snack jiggers on master bait, bobbers, all that fishin’ gibberish ‘n’ jibber-jabber. We politely pretended to care.

Since we don’t hunt, fish, race motorized toys, or drink, we walked, read, thought, napped, and talked. Also, for a while we watched this epic battle, Skele-Tree versus Vapo-Cloud.

The sun lowered, we got hungry and discovered the usual can opener problem. Faced with bean-less “beanie-weenie” I simply dug the hammer and scraper-thingy out of my tool box. The adage to “use the right tool for the job” is pretty flexible for cheap folks.

You can do this with hammer and screwdriver, or rock and screwdriver. Rock and knife works but not every knife can take a rock clobbering. Rock on rock sounds bad-ass but beware of teeth-breaking fragments in yr processed food. Never use the rotting granite around Prescott for this, but the volcanics here at Ashurst Lake near Flagstaff are fine.

My Boy Scout hijinks included putting canned goods in the camp fire, which would then explode, spraying painfully hot food on bystanders and their tents. It’s possible to open a can this way if you aim carefully and don’t mind eating most of your shot-gunned dinner off the side of a tent, then hunting and gathering the rest.

Why dirty a knife now?

Gore-May camp dinner. Recipe: beans, wieners; heat, eat.

 Post-dinner meander:

 

Mid May so alone in the place. Read until dark, then went to sleep. No sound but wind swishing trees, thankfully dissipating bean digestion aftermath to the stars.

%$#@!

“The price people pay for living in the production called American society is that they are condemned to continually watch television and read newspapers [or computers!] to know “what’s happening,” and thus they have no time to play with their own children or get to know the neighbors or birds or plants or seasons. What a dreadful cost!”

Gary Snyder, from The Real Work. New Directions 1980. p.168