“God damn, it may have been dark, but I’d swear it was Warren Beatty I startled raiding my hives,” claims Texas apiarist Hank Wangold. “The critter was caught in my flash light beam for a second – a look of panic in his eyes and his balls dripping with honey – before he ran off!” Despite the honey smeared celebrity clearly having his pants around his ankles, he was able to out pace the sixty-eight year old Texan, and escaped into the night, leaving a ruined beehive behind him. “That’s the fifth one so far this year,” grumbles Wangold. “It’s always the same – the top ripped off the hive and the combs smashed, like they’ve been pierced with something tubular.” Not surprisingly, with his hives , Wangold fears for his livelihood. “If I lose many more hives, I’ll be facing financial ruin,” he declares. “From now on, I’m going to be standing guard over ‘em with my shotgun – all night, every night if I have to. Any damn Hollywood-type who comes near ‘em will get both barrels!” Wangold is adamant that all of the attacks are down to celebrities, although so far he has only positively identified veteran star Beatty. “I didn’t get sight of the critters the other times, but one of my neighbours reckoned he had a sight of that Alice Cooper running into his corn field, honey all down the front of his pants, which were flapping open, after the third hive was attacked last month,” he muses. “Apparently his manhood was grossly swollen with bee stings and he was screaming as he tried to swat swarms of them away from his groin.” In another possible sticky celebrity sighting, a group of local boys reported seeing what appeared to be Jim Carrey, naked from the waist down, being chased by a bear through some nearby woods, shortly after the second hive attack. “He was shrieking like a baby,” chuckles Wangold. “They reckoned that every time the bear got close enough, it was lickin’ his honey-glazed ass!” Wangold isn’t alone in having his hives attacked in this way. Apiarists all over the US have been suffering similar attacks, with many being forced out of business due to their losses. Indeed, in some States entire bee populations are disappearing as the insects abandon their threatened hives. For months scientists were baffled by the phenomenon, until a piece of video footage posted on YouTube revealed the startling truth. “A bee keeper in Pasadena managed to get footage of an attack on his infra-red security cameras,” says Professor Larry Porker, bee expert from the University of Alabama. “It clearly showed what appeared to be Jim Belushi tearing off the top of a hive and shoving his penis into the mass of agitated bees! He manages to hold it there for nearly two minutes before the pain gets too much and he runs screaming into the night.”

Naturally, Belushi’s agent has denied that the figure in the video is his client, adding that Mr Belushi’s recent hospitalisation and subsequent bow-legged walk was the result of minor burns sustained in a barbecuing accident. He also suggested that the hive attacks were down to bears rather than celebrities. “That’s just ludicrous,” snorts Wangold. “Why in hell would a bear want to stick its cock and balls into a beehive?” However, Belushi’s agent, along with many other commentators, has also questioned why his client – or any other celebrity, for that matter – would want to expose their genitalia to multiple bee stings? “I blame that Mick Jagger,” explains Porker. “Ever since a British tabloid revealed that back in the 1980s he’d tried sticking his manhood into a bee-filled bamboo shoot in an attempt at penis enlargement, every B-lister and washed up rock star has been trying the same thing.” Indeed, exposing one’s privates to bee stings has become the latest craze to grip less-well endowed male celebrities across the US, despite warnings from medical experts that there is no scientific evidence to suggest that it might be effective. “Whilst there might be some temporary enlargement of the member as a result of swelling from the bee-stings, it would be too painful to even attempt penetration with it,” opines Dr Ralph Dongle, an expert on erectile dysfunction. “Having said that, it would be so grotesquely disfigured and discoloured, it would be completely unattractive to any woman, anyway.” Dongle also warns that exposing one’s genitalia to bees could even prove fatal to those allergic to their stings. “We’ve already seen Frankie Muniz admitted to an ER in LA suffering from anaphylactic shock, resulting from an allergic reaction to bee-stings on his penis,” he claims. “He later claimed that he’d accidentally spilt an entire jar of honey on his groin whilst at a nude picnic and had been attacked by a passing swarm of bees, but that didn’t explain the honeycomb he had impaled on his penis when the paramedics brought him in.” Professor Porker believes that the damage being caused to American beehives by the craze is so severe due to the relative impotence of indigenous bee-stings. “Look, Mick Jagger was supposedly doing this down in the Amazon rain forest with the local Indians,” he points out. “Any apiarist will tell you that those wild South American bees are far more virulent than our domesticated varieties. Consequently, you’ll need hundreds more of their relatively puny stings to achieve the same penis enlargement effect.

With the video footage of Jim Belushi’s alleged antics seen by millions on the internet, there are fears that the craze could extend beyond celebrity circles. “If every man worried by the size of his member starts shoving it into a beehive, the impact on the United States’ bee-keeping industry could be devastating,” says Professor Porker. “Once a hive has suffered one of these assaults, the bees abandon it completely. Often apiarists don’t realise that they have been the victims of an attack until they check their hives after the winter, only to find them empty!” Wangold isn’t surprised at the bees’ reaction. “I don’t blame the poor bastards,” he says. “I think I’d do the same damn thing if some degenerate Hollywood bastard stuck his cock through my letter box and waved it around, busting up the place!” With no end in sight to the attacks, Wangold and his fellow bee keepers are threatening reprisals against celebrities they suspect of violating their hives. Already, Nickleback lead singer Chad Kroeger – suspected of defiling a bee hive in Arkansas – has been attacked in his home by two men, who first subdued him by blowing smoke through his letterbox. He was unable to identify his attackers, who hit him over the head with a giant honeycomb, as their faces were obscured by bee keepers’ hats. Hard man movie star Steven Seagal, meanwhile, suffered a far more serious assault. “These guys with nets over their faces burst into my house and pinned me to the ground, before prising my buttocks apart and pouring honey up my butt hole using a funnel,” he sobs. “Then they let this whole swarm of bees loose in the room – it was agony! I thought my rectum was going to explode! The emergency services had to use a high pressure hose to flush them all out!”