The Great Johnny Jones: Bees

TALES OF THE GREAT JOHNNY JONES
BEES
         Working for the U.S. government was always a blessing. Not only did it pay the bills, it provided some of the best opportunities to observe the entire cross section of America. It enabled me to observe the various types of workers they hired to do the important work required to support our nation’s goals. This story and the many others to follow are all mostly true with only a little bit of artistic license being used. Some of the characters are composites of the many people I worked with. Only the people that were there will be able to identify the real names of the characters. So I have therefore created a composite of those people into someone I will call Johnny Jones.

         “Hey, where’s Rob?” asked Johnny Jones. Johnny was a power plant electrician and had just come on duty.
         “Don’t know. Have you looked in the boiler control area?” asked Dan Brooms.  He was the dispatcher on duty and could just tell by the way Johnny was acting that something was up. Any time Johnny got this excited, something crazy was going to happen. “Why, what’s got you all excited?” he asked.
         “There’s a clump of honey bees outside on a valve and I want to know if I could capture them and start making my own honey,” said Jones. “And Rob raises bees and can tell me how to catch them and bring them home to start making honey.” Then Jones shot out the door heading over to the boiler room area to consult with Rob Killdeer, the power plant operator on duty. Rob was always ready with his homegrown advice, some of which was almost useful if you didn’t kill yourself in the process of using it. After getting lengthy instructions on how to go about capturing a hive that is splitting with a new queen bee, Jones was off to collect the equipment he needed.
         “Oh brother!” said Dan. “I know this is not going to be good.” He then radioed the rest of the crew and said, “Jones is at it again. He’s going to try and catch some bees.” The crew asked where this was going to take place so they could watch. They knew anything involving Jones usually turned into a three ring circus with top notch entertainment, but only as long as you kept your distance.
         Fred Thompson and Joe Mosley arrived in their pickup truck at the site that Jones had indicated the bees were swarming. “My God, There they are!” said Joe. There was a large clump of bees covering one of the water valve risers. “There’s Jones also.” Sure enough, Jones had come prepared to capture the bees.
         Jones had put on two jackets, yellow raingear pants, and was wearing heavy cotton gloves. He had a cardboard box, a CO2 fire extinguisher, a roll of duct tape, and a large 55 gallon size clear plastic garbage bag.
         “What the hell is he going to do with the bag and the extinguisher?” asked Fred.
         Just then, Jones snapped open the bag, scooped it full of air, placed it over his head, and duct taped the bag around his neck. He then started to spray the clump of bees with the extinguisher. This had the effect of making the bees dormant due to the CO2 and cold temperature.
         ”It looks like maybe this time Jones is doing something right. I sure hope he doesn’t run out of air before he finishes the job though,” said Joe.
         Jones then started gently scraping the bees into the box he had brought.
         Normally, if you reassemble a box from being flattened, you would tape the bottom. It seemed that in his haste, Jones only interfolded the bottom leaves together. He had his arm wrapped around the box and started loading it with bees. He was a bit nervous and started applying a little bit too much pressure to the opposite corners.
         Suddenly, the box collapsed into a parallelogram, the bottom flew open, and the clump of bees fell through and hit the ground in an angry mass. They then started to swarm around Jones and find any place he had neglected to adequately cover. At this point Jones was getting stung at about three times a second. He then started to run in circles and the bag over his head was alternately being sucked against his face and then forcibly blown back up. He then decided to tear a large hole to obtain fresh air. That’s just exactly what the bees were hoping for, a fresh target.
         Fred and Joe were about forty feet away and were laughing hysterically in the pickup truck. That is, until they saw Jones running toward them.
         “Quick, lock the doors,” said Joe. They had barely pushed down the locks as Jones arrived at the pickup with the bees still in a cloud around him.
         Jones soon realized that profanity and pounding on the hood and windshield was not going to get him inside the pickup. He therefore decided to make a bee-line toward the power plant.
         Ned Nellis, the power plant electrician foreman, was standing just outside the doorway, and was wondering what was going on in the lower area outside the plant. He had not heard the dispatcher radio the crew earlier. His eyes suddenly got bigger as he realized Jones was running straight toward him with a swarm of bees in tow. Sam turned around, went inside the door, took two steps toward the elevator, and pushed the call button. “How long does it take for this thing to come down one floor?” he was thinking. Just then the bell sounded the elevator’s arrival. The doors opened, he stepped in, and pushed the button to go to the next floor. A moment later, the outer door to the plant opened, Jones ran in, stepped on the elevator with the swarm of bees, and then the elevator doors closed. They both said that elevator ride took almost twenty minutes, but we timed it later and found it took only thirteen seconds.
         The next day, both Jones and Ned arrived back at work with many sizable bumps on their faces, neck, and other body parts. We also were swatting bees for the next several days in the power plant. For some reason, Ned gave Jones all the crappy work assignments that month.