B watcher

"Would you like to go and take a look at my special bees?" I said. "Yes," replied the Boy Wonder. "Good!" I said. "If we bring your little step, you can sit on it to watch them." "OK," said the Boy, picking up the plastic hop-up step, and then holding it up to me with the kind of Ooof! noise that says a Boy really can't be expected to carry his own step around. "OK," I said, taking the step from him. "Let's do it!" "Less doowit!" said the Boy, trotting off to the front garden.

Having the normal attention span of any small child, he sat on the step for all of about ten seconds, then knelt down next to it and leaned on it, then knelt up on it, then lay across it on his stomach and lifted his feet up behind him in skydiving pose, then went off and found another patch of flowers all of his own, and watched that for a while. But still, he was very interested in the hairy-footed flower bees, and I think he'd probably be able to tell you (if he felt so inclined) that the brown ones with yellow faces are boys, and the black ones are girls. Some unspeakable little tyke of his acquaintance has told him that if you see an insect you should stamp on it (because of course they have), but we had a bit of a chat about kindness, and I think he understood that Grandma DJiwll isn't a big fan of things being stamped on.

During our conversation I tried to get B to notice how the bees shy away from sudden movement, pointed out how big we are from their point of view, and explained that they can't understand what we're doing when we approach them, and might very easily think we were going to eat them. "Because lots of things do eat them," I said - but then in trying to list a few things that eat bees without stepping into the potential minefield that other invertebrates are their biggest problem, and thus putting him off spiders and wasps before we've even got started on them, I mentioned birds and reptiles, and then, running dry, said, "and even things like foxes, and dogs and cats, will sometimes eat them if they can catch them." I learned a valuable lesson of my own a few minutes later, when the pulmonaria had temporarily run dry and the plumpies had gone off to forage elsewhere, when the Boy said sadly, "They've all gone. The foxes eaten them."

I hastened to point out that there were no foxes to be seen anywhere around us, and explained that the bees were just drinking nectar from some different flowers at the moment ("Sweet juice," the Boy corrected me firmly, repeating the key words from my earlier explanation), and would be back soon. Which they were. However, the idea of foxes being delinquent creatures had taken firm root; it re-emerged at various points during the rest of the day, and by tea time they were allegedly capable of mounting a full-blown home invasion.

Memo to self: when dealing with a small child with a vivid imagination, police every word you say to him.