I decided to set up the Go Big Red Fan (my big electric fan, bought used at the Goodwill store) in the window to suck in cooler air from the outside. A problem arose: there wasn't any electric outlet close enough to the window to let me plug in the fan. So I went down the hall to the room where my computer is, and got the extension cord that the computer's plugged in to.
I wanted to pull the screen down, so that I wouldn't wake up covered in mosquito bites. When I lifted the wooden sash, various insects that had been sitting on the outside sill started buzzing around angrily. One of them was a truly HUGE bumblebee, which went zzzz thud thud thud zzzzzzzzzzz thud thud thud zzzzzzz thud thud thud against the inner window. I quickly closed the window again.
I realized that the bumblebee was probably confused by the light in my room. It's a single bulb with a glass shade around it, and to the bumblebee it must have looked like the sun, and so the bee thought it was inside in the dark and wanted to get outside into the light. (Bees aren't very bright; they seem to have a sort of finite automaton for a brain.)
So I went to the computer room and worked on opening the window there; it was a pain to get the window open and the screen pulled down because the sash has no springs or friction stop - so it falls down unless you hold it up. By yourself it's nearly impossible to get the screen down while holding up the sash, because the sash is heavy enough that you have to hold it up with at least one hand, and the screen requires two hands to pull down.
I'm not in graduate school for nothing, though, and I soon figured out a way to hold the sash up with my thumbs while unlatching and pulling on the screen with my fingers. After a bit of this fiddling around, I tried to put the fan in that window, but it was no good. The window isn't big enough to support the fan.
I should also point out that all this is taking place at about 2 in the morning, at which time my housemate is asleep downstairs and wouldn't be pleased to have me puttering around noisily with the electric fan and such like.
I went back down the hall to my room, and I coludn't hear or see the bee. I figured it would be ok to try to get the screen down, and ZZZZZZZ! the bee (which had merely been sitting on the sill again) flew right into the room and began fulfilling its innermost desire to make itself one with my light fixture.
I figured I could probably kill it with a good whack with a Consumer Reports if I tried, but my current state of dress (wearing only boxer shorts) was a poor state in which to do battle with a stinging insect. Now the honor of my species was at stake. I was not about to be displaced from my room by a buzzing little six-legged arthropod that couldn't even remember where the flowers were without help from the the other members of its hive mind. I mean, the bee hasn't even got lungs and foveal vision for goodness sake; it breathes by diffusion through its spiracles and sees the world as a zillion different little three-pixel pictures through its stupid compound eyes. I'm a vertebrate, damn it!
I retreated down the hall put on a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. The only-slightly-uncomfortable heat quickly became stifling and unbearable, and I realized that a life-or-death struggle between me and the bee would probably make too much noise and awaken my housemate.
Then I tried to outsmart the bee. I turned on the hallway light, and decided I would turn off my room light. That way, I figured the bee would think the sun was somewhere in the hallway and go in there - and I could shut the door to my room and finish fooling with the fan.
Now another problem arose. The bee was happily sitting on the pull-chain to my room light. I gingerly took hold of the chain, holding a magazine in my other hand with which I planned to defend myself. Click, and the light was off.
The bumblebee didn't go anywhere! It had outsmarted me - by just staying where it was!
I stood around in the hallway for a while, getting hotter and hotter and unhappier and unhappier, and finally decided to call it quits. I tossed the sweatshirt and jeans back into the laundry hamper and stalked into my room, stepping gingerly for fear that the bee had landed on the ground (see the childhood memories for why this is so important) and just lay down on my bed, daring the bee to bother me. Nothing happened; I was much cooler, and drifted off to sleep.
I was awakened near dawn with another zzzzzzzz thud thud thud zzzzz thud thud thud zzzz thud thud thud against the inner window. The bee was steadfastly trying to fly out the closed half of the window. I sat there for about ten minutes watching it wear itself out bashing its head into the glass. Then it buzzed around the wrong way, and fell down into a plastic Big Gulp-type cup that I was using to hold the sash open. It buzzed around the inside of the all-white cup for another five minutes before it found the exit and, feeling the wind on its face, buzzed happily out the window.
You may not understand the stinging sense of shame and failure I felt at that point. You see, the bee had outsmarted me. Then it turned out that the bee was outsmarted, in turn, by my windowpane. I had been outsmarted by something so dumb that it can't avoid stationary objects.