Precisely ten years ago I was living in a sprawling farmhouse made of tin and grass in rural Paraguay. I had been sent to this very poor community of 100 people by the Peace Corps organization to teach the women how to raise killer bees for honey production, thus providing the families with extra income.
Needless to say, I was not extremely successful in this endeavor. After only a few months of getting stung all over my arms and legs and even up the nose, I too grew weary of attempting to domesticate a seriously aggressive insect that obviously did not want to cooperate.
Have you ever opened a beehive?
Even approaching a humming box of 10,000 stinging creatures can be unnerving, but if the work "killer" is included, the adrenaline really starts thrumming in your veins.
You have to carry a smoker, in my case a tin can with burning wood chips inside and an umbrella-cloth air pump. The smell is lovely, wood in Paraguay is often from orange trees, and it decidedly calms the bees. They are in fact tricked into thinking their hive is on fire and so they slurp up as much honey as their bellies will hold, thus making them too pudgy to sting.
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