Jack and I have been very sneaky – but you shouldn’t listen to comments about my fat head! That just means it’s full of brains, and at least I’m not ugly. Like Jack is. But he woke me up very early this morning and we went over to old Shelley’s house to get all the fizzy drink bottles back. And we shut all the windows…

What? Don’t look at me like that. We’re good people, we recycled the bottles.

Anyway, there were only a very few bees left in the hive, and we soon took care of them. Jack got stung again, ha! I laughed…

Then we sneaked back home and got back into bed so it didn’t look like we’d been out. Not long after, the screaming started. It was wonderful. Mutant killer bees are good for something after all!

Mum and Dad came straight to check on us. They looked a little suspicious, but we were tucked up in bed and they couldn’t pin nothing on us!

It’s 2-0 to us. Thanks, Mr. Mendel! We couldn’t have figured it out without you!

So after the smokebombs failed I went back to basics. And this time the only thing Jemima had to do was to go to the shops and get me some bottles of fizzy drink. Sticky, super-sweet, brightly coloured fizzy drink! There’s this thing, you see, that you do if you’re trying to get rid of bees. I learnt about it on a gardening site. You leave open bottles of fizzy out, and the bees zoom in to get the sugar, and then they drown. You have to keep doing it to get all the bees, but I’m just going to use lots of bottles and do it all at once.

But I don’t want just to drown them. I’ve been stung like a squillion times and it’s someone else’s turn! So I’ve drunk some fizzy out of each bottle (Jemima helped, even though I didn’t want her to) and cut a small hole in the side of the bottle and stuck a cardboard tube in it. So there were two holes in each bottle – the one that I made, and the one you get when you take the lid off. Got it?

Then I got some wire meshy stuff and put it just over the fizzy, so the bees would fly in to the mouth of the bottle, but not be able to reach the fizzy and drown. But I glued lots of sugar to the inside of the cardboard tubes, so that instead of flying out the top of the bottle again, the nasty vicious stinging bees would crawl down my little tunnel.

The weather’s getting a lot warmer now. People sleep with their windows just a little bit open.

So tonight, when everyone’s asleep, I’m going to sneak out and set up my dozens of bottles around old Shelley’s house. With the end of the tube wedged into the window.

Let’s see how HE likes being attacked by killer bees! 

Jack and I (well, mostly Jack, which is why the plan wasn’t very good) had a plan to get rid of the bees. They don’t like smoke, right? And on tv, when someone’s trying to get honey out of the hive, they always wear those funny clothes and have a big bellowy thing that pumps out lots of smoke and puts the bees to sleep, so the the person who owns the hive can steal all their honey. So Mr. Shelley is a would-be murderer AND a thief.

So we thought we’d put some smokebombs in the hive to make them all sleepy, and then push the hive into the pond so all the bees would drown! Actually, it was ME supposed to be doing all this. Jack is a big baby about being stung.

Hey! I made the smokebombs, didn’t I?

Shut up. You also wrapped me in a shower curtain and put one of Mum’s kitchen sieves over my head.

Total improvement.

SHUT UP. So I sneaked over when Shelley went out to post a letter, and set off the smokebombs. It looked like they worked, so I pushed the hive into the pond. But Mr. Shelley hasn’t kept it filled since we killed his fish, and it was only a few centimetres deep. Most of the hive was fine.

Then I fell in, and Shelley came home. I managed to get away, but he came over after dinner to return the shower curtain. Mum and Dad were furious. They think he’s so nice and we’re so mean and they wouldn’t believe us when we told them that he was making killer bees to kill us all in our beds! 

We’re grounded for a month. :(

We used Fred to go back in time and talk to Gregor Mendel. He was pretty weird for a monk, but he told us a lot about how you can breed living things to make them how you want – he told us about the beans he worked with, and how he could make beans that were yellow or green depending on which parent beans he chose. He was trying to do the same thing with bees too but he made really angry super-bees that stung too much.

Jemima reckons Shelley is probably doing the same thing. We forgot to ask Mr. Mendel how he killed the bees but now that we know they’re dangerous we have to stop Shelley. If you can figure anything out from the talk we had with Mr. Mendel, let us know. We recorded it and you can listen to it below.

Gregor Mendel Interview

Anyway, the bees don’t seem to need all that oxygen so I don’t know what’s going on. Me and Jack are going to have to come up with a plan to get rid of them – I don’t know what kills bees though. I think he plans on using Fred to get some ideas.

You see, we managed to get down to the MS’ basement – which, I have to say, extends a LOT further than I realised. There’s probably more weird stuff behind some of those doors, and I’m not sure I want to know about it. I know he’s doing something with bees, I can tell… but I couldn’t get them open, and we had to finish before the MS came back and trapped us down there.

But I’m getting off-track. We managed to break into the dragonfly room with a diamond-headed drill. It cut through that glass like nobody’s business! So we made a really big hole, which was good, as all the oxygen rich air came out, and all the normal air got sucked in. And as the oxygen content of the dragonfly room got less, they started to fall to the ground – too little oxygen for them to fly in. Dr. Diggit was good for something after all! 

It was really creepy and almost a bit sad. But that didn’t stop us from going and stomping on them when they were well and truly flopping on the ground. I’m not getting dragged down here to end up like Cerberus, no way!

We kind of scooped up the rest of him and buried him our back yard. It was nice, I guess.

And Jemima’s all happy, but the MS has just come home and he won’t be. He’ll know it was us.

And he’s going to want revenge.

There once was a neighbour whose flying

Insects were becoming so trying

We bounced on them pop!

And gave them the chop

And left them all dead and quite dying!

I’m so good at poetry. I’m so good at everything! I got so many of those nasty things, they won’t be bothering me any more!

And then, POW!! SMACK!!! BAM!!!!

I’ll smack you in a minute, Jemima. For all that whining about my comic books, you sure read them often enough. I expect you enjoy all the violence and gore.

What else is there?

Typical girl. Look at the machines and cool gadgets they have? What would Batman be without the Batmobile and all his other stuff? Just some stuck-up rich old guy in a silly suit, that’s where.

Boring.

The machines are NOT boring. They’re the best part!

I didn’t mean them, I meant you! When are we going to get to smash stuff? I want to smash stuff! 

If you’d stop coming over here to bother me, and stayed at the window like I told you, you’d be able to see when the MS leaves. Then we could go over.

What happens if he just uses the telephone to speak to the ex-CT like any normal person?

I’ve been doing some research on that twin. He’s even more freakish than the half living next door. He’s all into this hippy-living-on-the-land rubbish. No TV at all! So he doesn’t have a phone or a computer like normal people. I think he used to, but there’s a big blank in his life before 5 years ago. I wonder what he was doing…?

Wheeeeee! I don’t care Jack. He’s gone, look at him go! I hope he gets a speeding ticket. A really really enormous one, like Mum got when you put jet-fuel in the car.

Let’s not bring that up again, I’m trying to forget it. She still won’t let me have the rest – I didn’t use the whole drum, you know.

But that’s enough of that. Get your stuff, Jemima, we’re going in. I have a plan.

The one time we actually NEED him to be around, he swans off for WEEKS!!! That’s gratitude for you. Haven’t we given him a home? Anyway, I got revenge. I fed him some of Jemima’s biscuits.

Anyway, after he turned up, looking all embarrassed and with half a dead monkey sticking up out of his cushions (I forced it back in, honestly, Fred’s eyes are bigger than his stomach) we hopped on and told Fred we needed to go back to see Dr. Anonymous again. He doesn’t like her very much, and I think he would have bolted if we hadn’t already been sitting on him. But I threatened to burn his paisley fringe with a magnifying glass, and off he went. Negotiation, that’s what I like. 

Upshot is, there used to be giant flying things like what the MS has in his basement way back in the olden days. The REAL olden days, that is, even before the stone age. Before people at all! Meganeura, they were called (the giant flying things, that is). It turns out that oxygen helps make them so big – there used to be more oxygen in the air than there is now, and insects like Meganeura could grow a lot bigger than they do today. So THAT’s what old Shelley has been up to in his basement lab! He’s been breeding those dragonflies in a high oxygen environment. He must have been doing it for AGES.

Well, we’re going to put a stop to that, I can tell you. I don’t want those things buzzing about! I mean, they probably can’t fly outside in normal air, but that doesn’t mean the MS wouldn’t bundle us up and shove us in there with them. I wouldn’t put it past him. And EW! Can you imagine them buzzing round you staring with those creepy eyes, wondering which part of you’s juiciest?

Jemima and I are planning a raid. We’re doing it for Cerberus, see. I mean, I know we killed him and all, but that was an accident and we left him decently dead. WE didn’t dig him up because we were too cheap to go buy a dead sheep, NOOOOO.

Revenge is going to be sweet.

Jack’s there now, which is silly as we had a day off school today, yay!, as the only thing that Jack ever reads is comic books and manuals on how to put his boring machines together. They both have lots of pictures, so that’s why he likes them. It must be a boy thing. Dad likes magazines with lots of pictures as well, but he won’t let me read them, the big meanie.

But don’t think he’s gone to read anything! Nooo… I just think he has a crush on the new librarian. She’s not as pretty as me, though. You should see how he looks when we see her at school – like a big dumb doggie all hoping for a pat. Like Cerberus, really, before we killed him. Jack and Teacher up a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!!! Not that she’d want to kiss him, he’s gross. I don’t think he’s had a bath for two days.

I hope the librarian doesn’t go the same way. D’you think Jack will put her in one of his machines? I might help if he did…

He says he’s looking for information about giant insects. We want to go talk to horrible Anonymous, but Fred has gone missing. He does that sometimes. I wonder who he’s visiting? Maybe there are other couches like him somewhere… So we’re going to have to wait until he gets back, which is dumb. I don’t like to wait. Have tried calling for him in my highest voice, but Jack says I  like a sick bat and if I don’t shut up he’ll turn my bed into a rack. He says that if Cerberus was alive he’d be howling right now. 

Then he said he’d put nails in it when I told him he should use the internet instead of the library to find out stuff. That’s where I get all my recipes from! I don’t like the idea of being eaten by bugs. They eat lots of yucky things, I thought it was just plants and stuff! But there are some who eat meat, too, and some that eat stuff like honey. And some that eat POO!! EWWWWWW! I’d rather starve.

But worse than bugs eating poo is bugs eating ME.  I’d rather eat them instead.

I think I’ll do some expewiments. Jack’s not the only one who can! What bug should I eat first, d’you think?