We join apiarist [1] Albert Taylor as he is inspecting his bee-condos. He takes the roof off of one and samples the honey while he talks to the bees as if they understood English; you know, like a dog does. And kudos to the actor (Timothy West) who appears to have done this himself and risked ending up like Nicolas Cage in the Wicker Man. And by that, I mean becoming an object of mockery and ridicule, not being stung.
White Condos for his Bees
In the house, Mabel Watson is trying to feed their new baby, but she won’t eat. Albert is not too concerned even though the baby weighs 2 pounds less than when she was born. He is more interested in the local news because is appearing on a segment tonight.
He tells the “journalist” he built his first bee-hive when he was twelve to hide porn and now has six acres of bee-condos filled with porn. He is a local legend because he never wears protection, yet has never been stung by a bee or gotten the clap. When he was a kid, he let the bees crawl over his face and hands.
Upstairs, the baby is wailing. Mabel is distraught over her baby’s condition. For some reason, she is lounging about gratuitously sporting a lavender condo for her own B’s.
Lavender Condo for her B’s
On the telly, Albert is talking about the titular Royal Jelly. It is secreted by bees like milk is secreted by mammals. It is fed to some bees for only three days, but a queen gets it for her whole larval life. This allows her to increase her weight by 1,500 times in five days. The “journalist” suggests a 7.5 pound baby would balloon up to 5 tons. Hmmm, I wonder . . .
Albert has the same idea. He goes up to their bedroom where Mabel is crying and the baby is still shrieking. He wheels the bassinet to the spare bedroom and tells her to rest for twelve hours. He will take care of the next feeding.
Mabel wakes up late the next morning and finds Albert working on the beehives. He has the baby out there with him which seems dangerous. He had no trouble getting her to eat. Mabel is thrilled that she already looks healthier.
That night, Albert proudly admits he has been sneaking Royal Jelly into the baby’s bottle. Mabel is pissed. He says it “keeps people young, makes their hair grow.” Which, of course, makes you wonder why he isn’t spreading the stuff thick as avocado on his toast.
But wait, he then says he drank it and it increased his fertility so he could finally knock Mabel up after 9 years. So why is he bald? I guess that is explained by the hair seen peeking out of his shirt cuff. OK, so his arms are hairy. Like a bee.
He has also started interrupting his speech with random bzzzzzzes. Hmmm, they do know that a bee’s buzzing sound is made by its wings, right? It is not them talking.
Mabel looks at the baby and is horrified to see it has turned into a giant grub. Well, she has to be horrified for all of us because we don’t get to see it. The frame freezes and a very cheap and pointless video effect prevents us seeing anything. Viewers got a better payoff at the end of Rosemary’s Baby. We saw tiny hands gripping a weapon, the emaciated frame, the crazy eyes, the satanic hair — and that was just Mia Farrow! [2] Heyyoooooo!
So it certainly was another episode. Susan George is always welcome, and becomes the hottest Mabel since The Man with Two Faces. [3] How this beauty ended up with a dumpy balding guy 16 years older than her is another story — and one I would study like the Zapruder film. The story is very simple, and the ending becomes pretty obvious (although it could have been the amazing colossal baby instead). Robbing the viewers of that shock was just criminal.
Other Stuff:
- Unable to work in Marie Kondo or Brundlefly or Polaner All-Fruit.
- [1] Word of the day: Apiarist.
- [2] Actually, she was pretty cute.
- [3] Sorry for the objectification.