Brought to you by the letter B

"Hang on a second, something's wrong with my jeans," I said.

JS and I paused in our walk to breakfast, as I bent to adjust the outside seam on my right pant. The seam was bent oddly, I thought, and that was why it was bothering me. But when my fingers pinched at the fabric, they found a small bump between them. "It's not just the seam--there's something here--" and my left hand held the bottom of the pant leg open for whatever it was to fall out. (An egg sac? I imagined. Probably a dried-up sticker from some plant.) It skittered scratchily across my skin on the way down, down along my leg, down through a jean tunnel, and fell my hand--

a small black thing, segmented,
gleaming, with two narrow wings and too many jointed legs--!

My hand flung it away. It landed on the sidewalk, a beetle-y bee or a bee-like beetle. A shudder convulsed me. That was in my jeans? How did it get there? Was it dead?

It did not move. We glanced at it, then scurried away, babbling.

Bees, please stay out of my pants.

(It seems this blog has an entomological theme this semester. I assure you, it was not planned. All events recorded thus far actually happened as described.)

[POST SCRIPTUM: I realized that, when I found the bee in my jeans, I had not worn those jeans since last washing them, and that I had hung them outside to dry in the sun. . . Apparently a bee wandered into them while they were drying, and just didn't make it out. What the heck.]