BY TOM LAVIS
TLAVIS@TRIBDEM.COM
Crutch Crupnik came over to my house during the long Labor Day weekend to ask for help.
I reached out to shake his hand and he cringed as if Ted Kennedy had stepped on his foot.
“I can’t move my arm,” he said.
He slowly raised his right arm and I could see a puffed-up area between his forearm and shoulder.
“I got stung by a bee this morning when I tried to get a Frisbee down from the tree,” Crutch said.
I immediately asked the obvious question: “Do people still play Frisbee?”
“I came here for help, not sarcasm,” he said.
“What is that hanging from your elbow?” I asked.
A large pocket of skin had been stretched to its breaking point as a big water pocket dangled from his arm. It resembled a water balloon hanging on a tree limb.
“I was going to stick a needle in it, but
didn’t want to get water on the kitchen floor,” he said.
He was told that placing an aspirin on the sting would reduce the swelling.
“It might have worked, but it kept falling off my elbow,” Crutch said.
He found out later that he should have crushed the aspirin and made a paste.
I suggested to Crutch that we should call my buddy, Buzz Yobo, who is a stinger control technician at Super Bee Pest Control, to rid the bees from his tree.
“Buzz was once stung by 200 Africanized killer bees and lived to tell about it,” I said. “I hope you can understand sign language, because it will be at least six months before Buzz actually will be able to speak again.”
Instead of bothering Buzz, we decided to come up with our own plan.
Crutch was watching the Implausible Channel a while back when he saw an episode of “The World’s Dumbest Jobs and Why Are You Watching?”
“The guys fighting killer bees wore heavy canvas coveralls and used a thick, mesh face net over their head,” Crutch said.
We were going to face the enemy head on and decided to make our own bee-proof suits, similar to those Crutch saw on television.
We went down to House Heaven home improvement center and went to the paint department to buy some coveralls.
All they had were the paper kind that are good for a single use.
While we were there, we also bought work gloves, goggles, tall garbage bags to protect our heads and duct tape to seal any opening where a bee might try to enter.
But the key to this operation was Crutch’s workshop vacuum.
“The guy on the show used a vacuum to suck the bees from their hive,” he said.
We got dressed and went to locate the hive.
Picture Marty McFly’s radiation suit from “Back to the Future” and you have some idea what we looked like. Only we resembled Jackie Gleason and John Candy stuffed like sausage into these suits.
We started sucking the swarm off the limb and into the 16-gallon container.
Let’s just say the bees grew agitated. Apparently they have an aversion to loud machines and two idiots disturbing their nest.
I soon discovered that there is no such thing as a homemade bee-proof suit.
We also learned that an airtight seal is required when sucking bees into a vacuum.
Apparently we did not have the right equipment. Later, I told Crutch the crevice tool would have been better than the upholstery brush.
Crushed aspirin, anyone?
