OF HORNETS, SPIDERS AND A SMASHED CAR WINDOW

If we start today’s chat with the word Vespinae, would you, instantly,  get what I am talking about? It would be wrong to suppose it is reference to the small motorbike called Vespa. Sorry, no pun intended but, Vespa is a joke compared to what Vespinae actually means. That dear friends, is the scientific name of Nyigu or Manyigu in Kiswahili. The no -nonsense insect bit me when I was a child growing on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. I might have been eight or nine AND funnily, I still remember the pain. Vividly. Like it was five minutes ago. So intense that I should compare the experience to a bullet wound; which not many of would like to try out, nor imagine.

WE SHOULD ALL BE CONCERNED ABOUT BEES...

Cultivating gardens,planting flowers and not using harmful pesticides is one way of ensuring bees survive... pic by F Macha

The earliest memory I have of bees is my mother yelling at me to lie flat on the ground in rural Kilimanjaro.  I must have been seven or eight. Swarms of bees would noisily zoom past like tornadoes. At that time I never associated bees and the sweet stuff they naturally produce.

The notion that bees are vicious insects that bite was as common to us villagers as were stray dogs and wild animals.

Ten years later (now a teenager) I was writing stories and poems and one was about the fierceness of bees.  I was, by then, aware that bees made honey and that honey was good for you. However, the idea that they were dangerous could maim even kill, dominated social values.