This morning I read an excellent (and slightly terrifying) interview of Rowan Jacobsen by the California Literary Review (via Mutant Palm) about the collapse of honeybee populations. A picture about halfway through the interview of a truck transporting bees between pollination jobs suddenly brought back (fond?) memories of one of my better China stories.

In late August 2005 my parents, wife, and I were in Beijing. My wife and I had just gotten married and (in lieu of a honeymoon?) we were showing my parents around China. We had hired a taxi to take us to the Great Wall at Simatai. The trip should have taken less than two hours (my wife and I had done it in January 2004), but the main highway was closed for repairs and we were forced instead to weave through the countryside. We were hot and tired from our day on the Wall, and were all eager to get back into the city, to our hotel, into a shower, and then to sleep.

Unfortunately, living up grandly to its reputation, Beijing’s traffic was horrible, even in the countryside. The roads were small and narrow, and we were crawling along behind all manner of livestock and crop-laden trucks and tractors. We had already seen a cow almost fall off the side of a cattle carrier (that stopped traffic for 20 minutes or so as they tried to jam the cow back into the truck), and thought we had seen it all.

That’s when the first bee flew in our window.

The first one we shooed out. Then another flew in. And another, and another, and another. Realizing that somehow we had driven into a swarm of bees, we quickly rolled up the windows and turned the air conditioning on. Then the first bee crawled out of the air vent. Soon the five of us were stuck inside an increasingly hot car at the end of a Beijing summer with no ventilation, surrounded by a swarm of bees.

We finally made it up to the source of the bees — a giant flatbed truck carrying boxes of honeybees, totally uncovered. A giant cloud of angry bees was trailing it, like the tail of some bizarre bee comet.

Some things just defy explanation.

Photo credit, macropoulos