Queenie Came Visiting Again – a true story

In late April/early May of every year, Queenie comes visiting and we play our game. It is always the same game and we’ve been doing it for years. And we played it again last Wednesday morning.

It is one you may well have played yourself sometime or another, and it can be quite challenging. All you need to play is an empty jam jar or pint beer mug and an old piece of card or large envelope.

The game always starts whilst I am sitting at my desk overlooking the back garden and tapping happily away on my computer writing my little stories as a soft buzzing sound approaches from my right. This buzzing gets progressively louder and I know what it is – a signal that Queenie has arrived and that the game is about to begin!

I finish keying in my sentence and then look up, already knowing what I will see.

The buzzing will have come from Queenie on her annual visit. Queenie is a very large bumblebee and will have flown into my study through the open veranda doors, turned right and then, pausing briefly to see what I am working on will have flown directly to the window in front of my desk.

She always comes in through the same door. That’s because my little bungalow sits across a beeline – an invisible apian super-highway that runs across it from the southeast to the northwest. Now Queenie is out looking for a nest site, but being rather heavy and so needing a lot of energy just to stay aloft Queenie doesn’t want to use unnecessary energy in gaining altitude to fly over the rooftop and so she always tries to take a shortcut through my home. But then, as always once she is inside she finds her way blocked by a window and she can’t get back out into the garden. This is a large window but it doesn’t open but Queenie never seems to remember that, and so as I look up from my keyboard there she is – buzzing furiously against the glass edges.

So I get up, and go to the kitchen to get my beer mug. I return to find Queenie crawling around on the windowsill emitting angry noises, no doubt trying to understand why the air between herself and the garden has unaccountably turned solid.

And then we play tag all around the window where I set about trying to trap her in the beer mug without hurting her or breaking anything, but of course, Queenie doesn’t understand I’m trying to help and darts away every time I close in. The more I try the noisier and angrier she gets, and I fear for her wellbeing.

Well after a while I succeed and whoop triumphantly and feel, I suppose, a bit like a goalkeeper who has just saved a penalty. Then I slide the cardboard/envelope between the beermug and the window glass, and there we have it. One beer mug with Queenie safely inside.

Now she becomes apoplectically angry, but to finish our game all I have to do is carry the beer mug outside the front door, lay it carefully down on the grass and release her. But this year Queenie seemed to be very tired after our game, and so first I popped a teaspoon of honey into the beer mug to help restore her energy levels, partially at least.

But last Wednesday it then all went wrong. As I bent down to remove the cardboard I heard a bang behind me and I didn’t even have to turn round to know that the through-draught had blown my front door shut. So whilst Queenie buzzed off happily going northwest over next door’s fence I was locked out.

And then it started to rain.

Congratulating myself for my foresight in asking my neighbours to keep a spare house key for me just in case it was only whilst walking up their path that I remembered they had just flown off for a two-week holiday.

In Spain.