The Bees of Big Bottom Road ... by Raff

Hello, my name is Buzzz. I am a little bee, I am only six months old and I have black and yellow stripes but under my tummy I have an orange stripe. I’m very creative and I think that the world can be a very spectacular place.  I live in Big Bottom Road. There are 99,432,118 bees in my family. The family is owned by a lovely flower-loving lady called Ms Proudlove and her horrible, mean, nasty husband Mr Strict. We live in the yard and they live in a neat little house. It isn’t very big because Ms Proudlove and Mr Strict don’t have enough money.

Today, like any other, was a normal day. Mr Strict was feeling angry, Ms Proudlove was feeling happy. I was feeling good about myself because I was going to help my dad make honey but the problem was that my family of bees wasn’t producing enough honey every day and this was making Mr Strict even grumpier as he liked to have his usual honey and toast in the morning. 

This was very bad news so it had to be dealt with in the Bee Council, which was basically a bunch of old bees with white fur talking about boring stuff all day long. They had a long boring talk about honey and toast and then the Council came up with a dashing idea to solve this problem. The solution was that some commando bees would have to be smuggled in a basket into Mr Strict and Ms Proudlove’s house to replace the scarce honey with a new jar. They were doing this because Mr Strict did not like going out and fetching the honey and he didn’t like buying it either, so the bees had to do all the work.

They were only recruiting young and strong bees to be commandos and they thought I might be good for the job. At first my dad didn’t think it was a great idea but then the Council persuaded him to let me join. When I joined up they gave me a leaf helmet which was very big and covered up my whole face. I felt very scared, what if we were caught? It would be a terrible thing and Mr Strict might try to hit us with a spatula!

At midnight we ventured across the yard until we got to the house. We could not get inside so we had to hide ourselves inside a basket of seeds with the jar of new honey and there we slept until the morning when Ms Proudlove came to collect the basket. When she went away to watch her favourite cooking show, we quickly flew out of the basket carrying the jar. It felt as heavy as a giant  boulder but we managed to get it inside the pantry. The pantry was dark and we couldn’t feel our way through but then we realised we were in amongst lots of jars. Suddenly we heard footsteps!

It was Mr Strict.! He had come for his usual honey and toast. We couldn’t figure out what to do but then I had an idea. I had noticed a hole in the cupboard. I quickly told my idea to my fellow bees so we squeezed out from between the jars and then zoomed straight out the hole like a bullet from a gun and we went through little cracks in the bricks which were covered with overgrowing weeds like the tentacles of an octopus. We struggled through the weeds until we finally blasted out and crossed the yard to home. We were welcomed back with a big party for me and my fellow bees and my father and my family were very happy and very proud of me.

Oh, and by the way, Mr Strict had his honey and toast and was only half as grumpy as usual.