Not in the book — told aloud in a recorded conversation, December 2017
In June of 1954, when I was fourteen, a swarm of bees came through our yard while a neighbour happened to be there — a German-named neighbour, Mr. Kraus. There were two pear trees fairly close together at the back of the yard, and when we saw the bees going around we banged on pots and pans, because he said that would make them land. I don’t know if it had anything to do with it, but land they did: the queen settled on a branch maybe six feet off the ground, and all the bees clustered around her.
Kraus found a bee box somewhere and came back, and we set it up on some sawhorses and blocks. Then he gave the branch a big whack with a stick, and the whole cluster of bees went — whomp — down onto the bee box. We left them alone, they crawled inside, we put the lid on, and he said: “You’ve got a hive of bees. There’s your bees.”
So then they became my bees.
Not long after, I went to check on my beehive. I was a beekeeper now, so I had a veil on. I also had no idea whatsoever what I was doing, and did everything wrong. As I found out later, some hives are much more aggressive than others, and this hive was extremely aggressive. They got after me — got in the back of my jacket, up under the veil, in by my head and my glasses. They were locked in with me, eight or ten or a dozen bees buzzing around my ears, and I knew it was only a matter of time before every one of those bees was going to sting me.
I lost my cool and started to run. The bees followed. I ran, discarding clothes as I went, dropped everything, lost my glasses, and crawled in by some blackberry bushes, where I lay real quiet until they all went away — or until the few stragglers went away, let’s put it that way. Then I went back and picked up my clothes.
The next day my sisters counted the little red bumps — on my wrists, my ankles, around my forehead and the back of my head and neck. Forty-three. I can still remember the number.
The amazing thing is that I didn’t notice any side effects. In August I went out to Alberta and stayed with my cousin Otto, and one day he said, “Hey, you’ve got a bald spot on the back of your head” — the size of his thumbnail; I couldn’t see it myself. Before I came home there were two or three more, close together. Then they grew, and others came, and by May of 1955 I didn’t have any hair at all.
It wasn’t until many years later — around the time Jeanie and I got married — that I was donating blood, and the nurse interviewing me looked at my bare head and asked: “Were you ever severely stung by bees?” Ding, ding, ding. She had known a girl in nurses’ training who lost her hair after being badly stung. And when I got thinking about it: stung in June, bald spots by the end of August. We had never pieced it together until then.
It’s an immune-system reaction, apparently — it can happen from other causes too. It isn’t that you will lose your hair if you get stung by bees. But it’s possible. You can google it.