Monday Motivation: The bees won't sting you

My father is an agricultural consultant. So it should be no surprise that he helped me with most of my science fair projects.

Yes, I did science fair projects. Every year. And I loved it. Because I'm a nerd and that's just the way it is.

Anyway, I can't remember exactly what year it was, but one of my favorite projects had to do with bees. We wanted to know if certain tastes or colors attracted them more than others.

This is a bee. 

Hypothesis: Bees are more attracted to bold colors and sweet flavors.

Conclusion: Yeah. Of course they are.

This was before Google and the point of a science fair project was to display the Scientific Method. It's all very practical and I was young, so they didn't exactly expect us to make major breakthroughs in science at this point. We just had to conduct a proper experiment.

(Trust me, they get WAY more awesome, but I don't want to bore you with our research on particulate matter in the air. Not today, at least.)

As you can imagine, this particular project required me to expose myself to bees. Thousands of them. I couldn't just stand back and throw a piece of cardboard with colors and flavors on it at the bees to see what stuck. I had to enter their environment and brave a bee sting.

But my dad made that easy to do - and I never got stung.

Bees, he explained, don't just go around stinging people willy nilly. They do so when threatened. Whether that threat is real or perceived is entirely at the discretion of the bees, but they're generally not predatory in nature. Except for Africanized bees. Those buggers will sting you. But they weren't around when we were doing this experiment.

Generally, bees will sting when they believe they are going to be harmed. Now, think about what YOU do when you see a bee. Do you wave your arms around like you're in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" in an attempt to get this little insect away from you?

Now consider what that might look like from the perspective of a bee, which is, by the way, thousands of times smaller than you and about a million times more fragile (no, these are not official numbers, so don't be a smart ass). Yeah, it could sting you but YOU COULD KILL IT. Plain and simple. And unless you're allergic to them, which most of us are not, it can't kill you.

So, just take a deep breath and relax. Close your eyes if you have to. Pretend it's not there and soon it won't be. And while we're on the subject of letting things just go away, you really can take my dad's whole bee lesson and apply it to other parts of your life.

When you're faced with something you're very much afraid of, don't try to swat it away and risk getting stung, just take a deep breath, relax and react calmly. Your chances of survival will be better if you do.

By the way, that experiment took me to the state level, so Boom Shockalocka! (Click the link, I dare you.)

Also, these and other life lessons from my father are brought to you because he kicked cancer's ass. I'm on a mission to raise money to support the American Cancer Society, which invests in research that helped make lifesaving surgeries like his possible and provides programs I wish I knew about while he was fighting.

Click here to help me reach my goal.

PS. This calm, relaxed theory does not apply to cockroaches. It just doesn't. OK?