Bee Bee Gun - Television Tropes & Idioms

Batman Can Breathe In Space, but he's still allergic.

Bee afraid. Bee very afraid.

Have you ever been to a picnic where everyone freaks out when a bee buzzes by? Wouldn't it be great if you could take that primal reaction and channel it for your own purposes?

As it turns out, quite a few writers have had just that thought. Enter the Bee Bee Gun — the weaponization of flying, stinging insects. Bees tend to bee effective weapons of terror for a number of reasons — they're too small to shoot or stab, they always seem to come in swarms that can cover every inch of a person, they're difficult to outrun or outmaneuver, and they make that terrifying buzzing noise. Unlike bees in the real world, these ones don't seem to die after the first sting. God help you if you're allergic. ("Your insides will boil out of your eye sockets like a science-fair volcano!") And if you're not, well, being stung to death by thousands of bees would be a rather slow and unpleasant way to go.

A foraging bee isn't likely to sting you unless you try to touch it or happen to be covered in sweet stuff, but around hives they are extremely protective. (Yellow jackets, on the other hand, are just plain sadistic, but they are also wasps, not bees.) A stinging bee releases attack pheromones that attract and rile up more bees. Bee venom is designed to make you think you've been hurt badly, and enough of it causes your throat to swell enough that you asphyxiate. The pheromone sticks around and does not wash off quickly. Water is not an ideal deterrent - bees will sting whatever parts are above the water, and come after you when you get out.

Ironically, a true swarm of bees is not particularly hostile, some people swear by bee venom therapy, and when bee workers kill their queen they do so not by stinging, but by balling up around her and vibrating her muscles until the heat kills her.

The Bee Bee Gun comes a few varieties, such as:

An actual gun that shoots bees.
A special ability to control bees.
A character that is actually made of bees.
Dogs with bees in their mouths so when they bark they shoot bees at you.

A subtrope of Abnormal Ammo. Note that beeing able to control all kinds of insects is a semi-common Stock Superpower, but bees, specifically, just seem to bee the go-to insect for this kind of thing. Must be that whole Hive Mind idea. Or maybe it's because "bees" just sounds funny.

Examples:

Live Action TV

There was a bee-based villainess in the second season of Who Wants To Be A Superhero.
In the robot rumble episode of Malcolm In The Middle, Hal constructed a robot that shot a laser-guided stream of bees at the opposing robot's controller.
There was supposed to be a villain named Kane in Heroes season 2 that could control insects, with bees being his main "weapon". But he never showed up. This may be because of the Writer's Strike, or perhaps due to Special Effects Failure.
Smallville: One of the Krypto-Freaks of the Week was a girl who could control bees with her mind, which she used to eliminate her competition for class president.
X-Files, "Zero Sum." The conspiracy decides to test the viability of killer bees as a weapon.
- In another episode, titled "X-Cops", Mulder and Scully wind up on the TV show "Cops" in Los Angeles chasing a monster that assumes the form of its victim's worst fear. Though the viewers don't get to see it, one of the cop's fears is a bee-man and the man is nearly stung to death.
- And The Movie had the government genetically engineering bees that could deliver The Virus in their sting. X-Files really loves this trope.
Rescue 911: One of the segments detailed a traffic accident that involved a driver stuck in his vehicle, which was turned on its side—and the vehicle was a truck carrying bees. Of course, the bees were released. The fact that it happened at night didn't help; the bees were even more agitated by the headlights and sirens. This resulted in several rescue workers being sent to the hospital as well, and that stretch of the roadway had to be shut off for a few days. Ah, a testament to the power of bees.
A villain in Pushing Daisies killed the Victim Of The Week by sicking trained bees on her.

Anime

One of the competitors in the Hunter test arc of Hunter X Hunter used bees.
One of the Quirky Miniboss Squad from Ninja Scroll had a beehive for a back.
- Technically Mushizo's little friends were wasps but the overall effect is the same.
The Aburame clan in Naruto uses insects that live in their body for fighting and tracking, but they mostloy stuck to various kinds of beetles and flies. In an early filler episode, they were rivals of another ninja clan that did use bees.
Arukenimon of Digimon Adventure 02 could control insects with her flute. This included a swarm of Flymon, who, despite the misnomer, are bees. (It also included Digmon and Stingmon, two insectoid protagonists.)
The Get Backers manga has Dokubachi, a villain whose body is made of bees.

CardGames

Magic The Gathering has the artifacts Hornet Cannon and The Hive; the spells Bee Sting and Unyaro Bee Sting (functionally identical but the latter with more flavor); and the creatures Killer Bees and Unyaro Bees (which, as you may note, combined Killer Bees with Unyaro Bee Sting), Caustic Wasps, Giant Dust Wasp, and Hornet Harasser. Belligerent Hatchling matches up with description #4.

Comic Books

Swarm◊ is a Marvel Comics supervillain who is a sentient Hive Mind swarm of bees with Nazi sympathies, generally keeping to a humanoid form. Sometimes the skeleton of the Nazi scientist eaten by his irradiated mutant bee colony is under the bees, sometimes not. Either way, he appears to be in charge. "Everybody hates Nazis, and everybody is scared of bees. Together, they're the perfect foe!"
- A version of Swarm also appeared in Ultimate Marvel, but because she was simply a woman with the power to control bees, was significantly less awesome.
In the Amazons Attack storyline in DC Comics, the Amazons deployed a secret weapon: bees. This prompted the infamous above quote from Batman.
- The "bees" in question were giant "stygian killer hornets" whose sting could kill a person within... hours. Of course, being "giant" meant they were not very hard targets to hit from a safe distance (unlike regular sized insects), and since their venom took "hours" to kill someone (unless a cure was found) they were arguably far less deadly than a weapon that killed someone instantly. For a "secret weapon" unveiled by an invading nation that was already supposedly bringing America to its knees they left something to be desired.
  - And there was only about a dozen of the things anyway.
- Parodied in Blue Beetle, where Traci Thirteen uses a staff to cast "Gds Ddly Wpon" - magical Bees. (Obligatory response from Jaime's father? "My God.")
- There was also a running gag in Wonder Woman, post-AA, in which a special agent had to keep being reminded he wasn't recovering from an ordinary bee sting.
'Barnaby's Spelling Bees' in Viz ... one of their usual spoof characters whose schtick is that he has a swarm of killer bees that attack on command ... so long as their target begins with 'B'. Hilarity Ensues as normal.
The Golden Age superhero the Red Bee's entire shtick was a single trained bee that he kept in his belt buckle; being so ridiculous, he's mentioned with surprising frequency by modern writers.
- And there was even a ripoff of the Red Bee, the first Yellowjacket.
Recurring DC villainess The Queen Bee is an alien empress with insect-like strength and speed, projectile stingers, and mind-control pollen that can turn ordinary humans into "drones" for her hive.
A strip appeared in a British Anthology Comic in the 1960s entitled "The Stinging Swarm". It was about a gang of thieves that used a swarm of robot bees armed with paralyzing stings. While their victims were paralyzed, the gang would rob them blind.
The Flea from PS238 can control insects — bees included. And while all his other bug attacks are annoying, only the bees have so far made a power armoured soldier run around in a panic screaming "BEEES!" until his Mission Control could activate counter-measures.
The Golden Age hero Captain Freedom once fought an evil hillbilly beekeeper who had the Amazons beat—he created giant killer vampire bees.
The protagonists of Redwall used this trope at least twice. Admittedly, the second case was mostly dumb luck...
- The case in Marlfox was actually a case of the villains bringing it on themselves, though the outcome was the same. They chopped down a tree with which to make a battering ram, without realising that the tree had several bee/wasp/hornet nests in it (this troper doesn't remember exactly) and was riddled with biting termites. The good guys just sat back and watched the fun. Oh, and the good guys suffered similarly; in Martin the Warrior the title character and his friends walk straight into a clearing filled to the brim with angry bees.

Film

The Wicker Man remake: "Not the bees! Aargh, they're in my eyes!"
Little Nicky, by the new Devil: "So while we wait, for your enjoyment, I bring you a dear sweet man and an international icon...Henry Winkler! Covered in bees!"
In the Speed Racer movie, one member of the Viking-themed racer team had her car equipped with a beehive catapult. It is a testament to Crazy Awesome that this doesn't seem out-of-place at all.
Ruthless People: When Barbara learns of her husband's infidelity (and refusal to pay her ransom) she fantasizes about how she would punish him by covering him with honey and taking him to a bee farm.
The title character in Candyman can summon bees.
The Deadly Bees (shown on MST3K) has a mad bee farmer who bred a special breed of bee that will attack anyone or anything that has a trigger scent on it.

Literature

In Rudyard Kipling's Second Jungle Book story Red Dog, Mowgli stirs up a hive of wild bees to attack the marauding wild dogs of the title, having smeared himself with garlic so the bees won't attack him before he can reach the comparative safety of the river.
The Wicked Witch of the West has control over a swarm of bees in The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz.
- Elphaba retains this ability in Gregory McGuire's revisionist book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.
In Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, the first humans to land on Earth are killed by a native Martian's Bee Gun.
In Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy, Molly once tricked a squad of guards into thinking she could control bees. She made sure she was in shadow while the guards were brightly lit (knowing that the bees would fly towards light), opened the beehive and told the bees to kill them all.
The Discworld novel Lords and Ladies has Granny Weatherwax figure out how to possess the entire Hive Mind of a beehive just in time for a Big Damn Heroes moment.
Goosebumps: BEE THROWING! This blog explains it much better than I ever could.
In Lois Mc Master Bujold's The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, Dag attacks some people trying to disrupt his wedding by magically convincing the wasps in a nest that they are under attack.
Something similar happens in Redwall at least twice:
- The original Redwall; Jess Squirrel and Silent Sam put a hornets' nest in a barrel and drop it over the wall onto the bearers of the battering ram.
- Marlfox; the Abbeydwellers see that the titular villains and their followers are knocking down an old tree to use as a battering ram. They do nothing, because they know that said tree is full of wasp and termite nests, and the attackers suffer the consequences.
- Not quite the same, but Martin and his friends in Martin the Warrior get trapped in a clearing full of angry bees.
In the novel The Road to Damascus, a Bolo story written by Linda Evans and John Ringo, at one point in an alien invasion of their world, some protagonists throw the bee hives used for making honey into a barn where several of the invader's soldiers are found, the swarming bee's stings killing the soldiers.

Music

The song "Lord of the Hornets" by Robert Calvert of Hawkwind is about a crazy guy who breeds the aforementioned insects to attack people.

Western Animation

On The Simpsons, in the episode "Burns' Heir", Homer guesses that Mr. Burns's home is guarded by dogs, bees, and dogs with bees in their mouths so that when they bark, they shoot bees at you.
In The Terrible Thunderlizards, the Thunderlizards used bazookas, grenades, and guns that shot bees.
The Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers episode "Risky Beesness" was about a wacko woman who wanted to break into the music business in the worst way — by hypnotizing bees into doing her bee-dding: getting them to seal away Iron Goose and keep people from leaving the concert. She also used them to attack the Rangers when they attempted to stop her.
Invader Zim features bees amongst its other animal references, such as when a single bumblebee took down Zim's Voot Cruiser in "Attack of the Saucer Morons". Jhonen Vasquez has admitted on the DVD commentary that he has a thing for bees.
Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends did an episode where a glowing meteor crashes to Earth and creates a "body" for itself out of a swarm of bees. This entity, calling itself Swarm (see Comic Books above), sadly does not shoot pieces of itself, but instead energy blasts that turn humans into mind-controlled bee-hybrids.
Johnny Test has a recurring villain called the Bee Keeper who uses bees as a weapon and speaks in bee puns. In his first appearance, his raison d'etre is to eliminate all the sweet foods from the town of Porkbelly with his bees... so that people will eat his all-natural honey bars. Turns out he was the old guy from the adverts.
Sealab 2021: "BEEEEEES!"
Justice Friends in Dexters Laboratory also has a whole episode dedicated to this: "Bee Where?". Complete with the yell as noted above... BEEEEEEE!!!
An episode of the animated Plastic Man show included a bee-themed villainess (with honey-blonde hair) who turned out to be an apiologist. She'd appeared in the beginning of the episode, claiming that bees would take over the world someday. Her response to the Colony Collapse Disorder epidemic in North America in 2006 is unavailable.

Video Games

A plasmid in Bioshock turns your arm into a living beehive and shoots bees at your enemies.
- On the topic of this game, Yahtzee said it best. "No matter who you are, as soon as you're compared to a magical hand that shoots bees, you're going to f***ing lose."
The Pain, a boss from Metal Gear Solid 3, is a soldier whose body is also a living beehive. He uses bees and hornets offensively and defensively, as well as conventional weapons.
- This was mocked constantly in The Last Days of FOXHOUND. "I'm covered in BEES!"
- The official explanation for his abilities are... interesting at best. He got stung enough that the hornets thought he was a hornet too. Plus he kept a Queen Hornet a pack at his hip. Apparently that's all you need to control hornets with your mind.
  - And apparently all that you need to make hornets turn into a Tommy gun is a persuasive argument.
- The lurkmore wiki has the "Fresh Prince" version archived. The rest of the page may scar you for life. In case that wasn't clear, NSFW.
Half Life had the hive hand weapon, which shot alien bees.
There's an enemy in Kingdom Of Loathing named "The Guy Made Of Bees". Guess what his gimmick is.
- And guess how effective attacking is ... or how effective getting attacked is.
  - If you do manage to defeat him, you get a Guy Made Of Bee Pollen.
- There's also a door in the Sorceress's tower that shoots bees at you if you enter the wrong code.
In The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, you can catch bees and use them to attack enemies. The special "Golden Bee" returns to you afterwards.
- Normal bees return as well, but will start stinging you unless you catch them again.
The Pokemon named Vespiquen is a queen bee who uses combees to attack, defend, and heal herself.
- Your trainer did it first, with Beedrill.
- So a trainer that uses Vespiquen controls bees that control bees?
- In the animation it shows regular bees...
The Custom Robo series has a recurring Hornet Gun.
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath had several Bee-based weapons.
In Mega Man Battle Network 6, some of the enemies were beehives that, when you shot them, shot bees out at you. The battlechip you got from defeating them? It shot bees that home in on enemies. And if you deployed the beehive at just the right moment, when an enemy hit you, he'd stir up the hive and summon more angry bees at himself.
Speaking of The Blue Bomber, Mega Man 9 features a robot master named Hornet Man. Guess what he does.
- And his weapon, the Hornet Chaser, lets Mega Man do it too. The strangely adorable bugs not only attack enemies, but fetch power-ups to return to the "queen" (Mega Man). This is the only way to get some of them. Best not to think too hard about why Splash Woman is weak to them. Something about her having lighter armor than the other masters...
Mega Man X3 has Blast Hornet, who shoots hornets at you as a primary attack. His weapon, the Parasite Bomb, is a straightforward blast attack... until you charge it up. Then it shoots homing bees.
Q-Bee in Darkstalkers is a Cute Monster Bee-Girl who uses smaller (that is, about football-sized compared to her) bees in many of her attacks.
Bees are the symbol of Eve Online's infamous Goonswarm for just this reason.
Ratchet And Clank has two examples: Nano Swarmers in Tools Of Destruction and the Bee Mine Glove in Size Matters.
Both Civilization IV and the Medieval 2 : Total War add-on feature the Mayan Hornet Thrower. See below.
Hellgate: London has the Hive Blade/Swarm Edge swords and the Wasp/Windhopper/Swarm Hive guns. Of course, this is the same game with Electric Eel Launchers, so it's no surprise there. Also, the spell "Venom Armor" automatically sics bees on anyone that attacks you.
The aerial shooter Snoopy Vs the Red Baron has one of these as a weapon for Snoopy to mount on his Sopwith Camel.
Secret Of Evermore has the hard to find spell Sting which summons a swarm of bees that attack enemies.
The Incredible Hulk had the Enclave (A Secret Society of Mad Scientists) attacking the titular Hulk with a wide variety of weapons. Including The Swarm, which are... swarms. Of presumably bio-engineered bees. They are actually effective against the friggin' Hulk, who've proven capable of shrugging off nuclear weapons. Fortunately, his signature 'hand clap' attack is effective at dispersing the little buggers...
Resident Evil 0 features as enemies men made out of leeches, who are all controlled by a scientist who was eaten by a leech and whose personality was digested into its genetic memory.
Champions: Return To Arms had the Iksar Shaman, a man-sized sentient magic lizard who, for one spell, shot out bees. To balance that out, though, his animal summoning spell was a badger. Who will die a lot. I named him Kenny.
The monstrous Devouring Earth in City Of Heroes have "the Swarm", roughly spherical masses of bees that may be encountered independently or summoned by certain monsters. They're more a nuisance than a threat, except in large numbers; their stings do mild continuing damage and slow down the speed of your movement and attacks.
The Stranger in Stranger's Wrath gets Stingbees and Super Stingbees (these ones can home in on Outlaws) for his crossbow.
In the ARG "I Love Bees", one half of a fractured combat AI is sent back in time, finding its way to a website about bees and honey. Everything about it, up until the conclusion, revolved around...well, you can guess.

Tabletop Games

This troper was sold on Hunter: the Vigil when he found out one of the Endowments that could be afforded to hunters to put them on an equal level with supernatural beings was a Personal Defense Swarm, which was, in essence, a magical hand that shoots bees.
- Technically they're not bees. If we're going to be technical, they're actually horrible alchemical monstrosities formed from your own flesh after a seed culture of a single previous alchemical monstrosity formed when a completely different alchemical monstrosity tried to, and failed to create another of its kind from a human corpse, the aforementioned human corpse tearing itself apart and the nascent alchemically fuel monstrosity tried to, and possibly succeeded, in sucking out its creator's protohuman soul formed from the DIVINE FIRE OF CREATION. Also the pseudo-bees each have your face. And have to be fed on extracts of protosoul. Which you inject. I think by now that you've found out that this troper thinks that the Personal Defence Swarm is awesome.
Numerous bioweapons fire the alien equivalent of bees. Which then chew through the target's insides.

Web Comics

Get Medieval brings us the unforgettable Bee siege.
One recurring character in the Dada Comic Witch's Brew is Twenty Bees Man, a sort-of superhero with a beehive for a head and the ability to summon twenty bees to do his bidding.
House assaulting Foreman with bees is a Running Gag in MS Paint TV.

Real Life

The Mayans had soldiers specializing in throwing hornet nests at their enemies in battle. They covered themselves in thick mud to protect themselves from the obvious side effect.
According to William Gurstelle in "The Art of the Catapult," Alexander the Great had his catapults fire hornets' nests onto the decks of enemy galleys during the Siege of Tyre. Which is just ghastly.
Any twelve-year old who has filled a jar full of bees and thrown it into a crowded area.
The Battle of Tanga in WW 1, where startling idiocy was compounded by a great many killer bees...
A canceled US Army weapons project involved a chemical weapon that, when dropped on enemy troops, would attract and enrage any bees, wasps, or related insects in the area. This troper is sad the project was never fully realized.
- Bees and wasps emit an attack pheromone that attracts others to the target, usually when the hive is perceived to be threatened.
- The venom of the Asian Giant Hornet is not only one of the most painful in the world, but it also contains an enzyme that marks the unfortunate victim so that other Asian Giant Hornets in the vicinity will home in and attack the target.

Batter Up

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Big Badass Wolf

...Wow. With all this abuse, no wonder the bees are disappearing.

I'm covered in BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES!

I like my coffee like I like my women: Covered in bees!

Bee gone!

Don't worry, bee happy!