[Nate]

Back when I was living on Kibbutz, they had me working in the bee factory. Basically they bred bees in little plastic cubes 20cm on each side (about 100-200 bees in a hive) and then rented them out to farmers and greenhouses where they would be opened up and the bees would go out and pollinate everything. They were big-arse bees too. The worker bees were about two centimetres long and one wide and the queens (which we had a lot of) were about four or five centimetres long. Mostly they were trapped in the containers but you'd always have a queen or two buzzing around the roof. My boss told me never to open the hives as there were enough bees in one to kill a man.

My job was to put lids on 3000+ jars of nectar then put straws in a hole in each lid. Then I would take them to the hives and replace old jars with new ones, keeping my fingers clear because they could sting through the air-holes.

One day I was pushing a trolley with 20-odd hives on it, some of which were the new 'special' genetically-engineered bees, when I bumped the trolley into a shelf and all the hives fell off and open. I have never run so fast in my life. I was up and out of the room before the bees had even realised what had happened. So then I had to build up the courage to tell my boss that I had destroyed a couple of grand's worth of bees. So he had to turn on the red lights (bees can't see red and in the dark they settle to the ground) and he then went and stomped on all them. Goodbye special bees. *sniff*