COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

Ever had a bee sting? I have.

It’s usually not that big a deal, a little sting, a little swelling, unless it’s one of those horror stories about some guy on a ladder who disturbs a hive and gets stung 38,534 times, which is a lot, and makes it really hard to stay on the ladder.

But for people who are severely allergic to bees, even one sting is a definite big deal, as in a life or death.

Ask Cheryl Laidlaw of Newport Beach. She can tell you exactly how it works. So can her son, Andrew, who is 10 years old, and their dog, Beulah, who declined to give her age.

All three were enjoying a stroll on the beach last Thursday when Cheryl stepped on a bee, which is not good on so many levels.

First, bees don’t like to be stepped on and they do their best to sting whatever is stepping on them, which in this case, was Cheryl’s foot.

Two, Cheryl is highly allergic to bee stings, which means that even a single sting can shut down her air passages, set her heart racing then stop it, which is never good. It’s called anaphylactic shock.

Cheryl knew exactly what was happening, and fortunately for her, Andrew knew what to do.

He sprinted back to their house to retrieve his mom’s “EpiPen” — an emergency syringe of epinephrine, which counteracts the bee sting by relaxing the muscles in the airways, which are very useful for people who breathe.

As Andrew was racing back to his mom, EpiPen at the ready, a Newport Beach lifeguard truck had picked up Cheryl and waved Andrew down. Cheryl injected herself and the epinephrine did its work, just as advertised.

Everyone was greatly relieved, including Beulah, who said, “Who-ee, y’all had me goin’ for a minute there.”

I didn’t see “Akeelah and the Bee,” but I’ll bet the story of “Andrew and the Bee” is every bit as good if not better. Note to Mayor Selich: Draft proclamation for Andrew Laidlaw, Boy Hero, at earliest convenience; throw something in about Beulah if possible.

But here’s an interesting twist about Cheryl Laidlaw’s not-so-excellent adventure: However high the odds of stepping on a bee at the beach, they are even higher than you might think.

Why? Because the world’s bees are disappearing, and doing so at an alarming rate. Like every other problem these days, it’s been given a name — “Colony Collapse Disorder,” or CCD.

When beekeepers make their appointed rounds and check their hives, they find that entire colonies have disappeared, vanished, gone bzzz-zip, and no one knows where or why. It’s happening here, in Europe and Asia.

Do you care? Probably not. But you might care if I told you that a lot of the foods that we eat would disappear without bees.

It’s called pollination. Heard of it? Most of the fruits and vegetables you know and love and some you don’t couldn’t do their thing if the bees stopped doing theirs.

It’s so essential to farming that beekeepers travel from state to state in different growing seasons and rent their bees out to farmers for a few weeks at a time so that local crops can get the plant equivalent of a double espresso at 6:15 a.m. Experts around the world are stymied by what’s causing it.

Two theories are stress or bad eating habits or both, neither of which I understand. Exactly how much stress could a bee have? You wake up, you work the hive, you go have your way with a few flowers, you get back to the hive, you go to sleep. How hard can that be?

The bad eating habits thing seems even stranger. I have no idea what bees are supposed to eat, but how far wrong can they go?

OK, you’re going to dive bomb an open can of Pepsi now and then but how often does that happen? Do they hang around Dumpsters behind fast-food places? Do flowers have a lot of trans fat? I don’t get it.

But whatever is causing it, the busy little buzzers are disappearing faster than Hillary’s super delegates. But other experts say that everyone needs to settle down.

Apparently, this has happened before, perhaps not to this extent, but more than once over the years. Like whale beachings and Larry King marriages, sooner or later everything gets back in sync with the natural order and life goes on. Hope they’re right.

There are very few things I cannot do without, but the ones I can’t, I really can’t — do without that is. Tomatoes for instance. No tomatoes, no sauce. No sauce, no pasta. No pasta, life on earth disappears, sun is extinguished, it’s bad. Seriously.

So that’s it then. Andrew and the Bee, Beulah the Pooch and Colony Collapse Disorder. There is a lesson to be learned here. I think. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at [email protected].