Gary Bee Nimble, Gary Bee Quick

Back in the day when I was an avid hunter, my brother in law Erick and I were going hunting one weekend during deer season, plus we wanted to go a little early to set up camp at Lake Davis, about 100 miles or so outside of Reno Nevada, just on the California side of the border. We were high in the Sierra Mountains when we finally arrived and set up camp, and started checking out the area for signs of deer tracks so we would know where to set our blinds. Well, we settled in that night at the camp site, mind you there is a little snow on the ground that time of year, and we started a fire, and cooked come canned chili, and made some coffee, (by the way, if you are sharing a camper with a brother in law here is a great tip, chili is not such a good idea when both of you are sleeping in a confined area). Long story short, we ate, and hit the sack as we were planning to get up before the deer did, (like we knew when they woke up), yeah right!

Well, we woke up the next morning, and we had already made hot coffee the night before, we prepared it in the thermos, so that we would not have to start a fire in the morning, and still have our hot coffee in the morning. Once we had our coffee, we headed out across this field, and were headed for the other side of the hollow, to set up our blinds. For those of you who don't know what a blind is, its a place where you are going to hide and wait for the deer to come to you, and hopefully they will. Some blinds are up in a tree, others are camouflaged behind some bushes or trees. Well, it was a nice crisp morning and there was hardly any snow across the field and the field was about a half a mile across. My brother in law is very tall, and lanky, so he led the way, when all of a sudden he yelled, "BEES"! I had no idea what he was talking about, when all of a sudden, hornets were all over me!!

Erick had stepped into an underground hornets nest, and there were hundreds of them, they are the kind that keep stinging you, they don't loose their stinger! They were everywhere, under my hat, stinging my head, inside of my gloves, and i ripped those off, and they were sting me on my forehead, my neck, down my collar, on my back, anywhere where their stingers were effective, they were stinging, we were hitting each other with our hats to get the hornets off, and he said "What can we do"? and I said "RUN TO THE TRUCK"! So there we went, running as fast as we could with all of this gear, and getting stung all the way, that was a half of a mile, and you don't out run hornets when they are mad. We threw our stuff down when we reached the truck, and we got in the cab with hornets still stuck on us, but most of them were outside the truck. We started killing the bees that were still stinging us, and little by little, the ones that were on us were soon dead and on the floor of the truck.

Erick and I just sat there and watched the bees flying around the truck. He looked at me and said, "Are you allergic to bees"? "No" I replied, "Are you? I only ask that because your sister is extremely allergic to them". He said, "I dunno, how would I know, how do you tell"? I looked at him, and I had these pink dots all over my face like he did where we had been stung, and I said "You can tell if you have labored breathing, or you can't swallow". There was silence for about two minutes, and then I said "Do you feel like you have those symptoms, labored breathing, or is it hard to swallow"? He said, "Not yet, but I will let you know". Then we both started laughing uncontrollably. I started to laugh 1st, and he said while he was laughing, "What are you laughing about"? I said, "I am laughing because I don't know if I should start back down the hill to get you to a hospital, or if we should just wait for you to have the symptoms"!

He was still laughing, and he said, "I think I would know by now, don't you"? "Yeah", I said, "What do you want to do then, the bees are gone". He said, "Do you still feel like hunting, I mean, the deer probably seen us down there from the hills they were hiding in, and they are probably laughing at us saying, "Look at those two idiots down there, the only thing that they could find, were the bees"!! I started to laugh even harder, and I told Erick, "You think they are laughin' eh"? He said "Yeah", then I said, "Well, lets go and get them then". So we picked up our gear, and started out again, only in another direction, and I told him that this time, I would lead. Well, needless to say, the deer were so busy laughing, that we couldn't find them, I figured that they were all in the pub, laughing about these two idiot hunters doing a dance in the field, I just said, "Lets go home", and he agreed

When we finally made it home, my wife Christine said "Well, where's the deer"? Then we told her what had happened, and she started laughing and calling everybody to tell them we were having honey for dinner that night, Ha Ha....geesh. She counted the visible stings on me, and there were about 150 of them, and that, my friends, is another reason why I don't hunt anymore!!