June 17 - Buzz Kill

"Where did you get this information?"
"It came in a joint communique from the Department of Defense and the Department of Agriculture."
"This is a joke, right? Some idiotic prank?"
"No, sir. We have confirmation from the heads of both departments. It's for real."
"It" was a report that a swarm of killer bees that stretched for miles was heading toward Durban, South Africa's Moses Mabhida Stadium, drawn by the cacophony of tens of thousands of vuvuzelas being blown by fans at a World Cup match.
The theory was that, mistaking the buzz of the vuvuzelas for the sound made by a queen bee in distress, the swarm was closing in on the stadium, intent on protecting the queen from whatever was causing her to issue the distress signal.
The swarm was still far enough away that if everyone stopped tooting, the swarm might disperse and everyone would be OK.
The game was stopped immediately and the fans were told about the situation in English, Afrikaans, German, and several other languages, and then told to stop tooting their vuvuzelas.
The stadium was tense but quiet for a few minutes, and everything seemed fine until one fan couldn't resist anymore and tooted his vuvuzela.
Just once.
But then another fan did, too, and then another and another and within five minutes the whole stadium was so loud with the buzz of vuvuzelas that nobody could hear the desperate yelling of the stadium managers pleading with everyone to stop.
When the buzzing was at its nadir, a dark cloud of millions of killer bees enveloped the stadium and wreaked havoc on all in attendance. It was a rainstorm of bees, a blizzard.
After it was over, the stadium was in tatters and tens of thousands were injured.
A state of emergency was declared, and the remaining World Cup games in Durban were postponed indefinitely. The Red Cross and South Africa's military set up ad hoc field hospitals to handle the overflow from the hospitals.
The survivors of the swarm were put in quarantine and their conditions were closely monitored. As the days passed, the welts and blisters from their countless stings grew in size and density. This was accompanied by an increase in body temperature that the more jaded among the medical community referred to as World Cup Fever.
Within a week, the survivors were all in comas, and their blisters had grown so large that they had become connected and continued to grow until they formed a sort of blister cocoon around each survivor.
Meanwhile, South African apiologists managed to find the origin of the swarm, and were shocked to discover that they were of a species thought to have been extinct since the stone age. Their hive was inside a rock formation several miles outside of Durban. The theory was that in the absence of their queen, they had gone into what the apiologists called uber-hibernation or "ubernation." And they'd been in that state of suspended animation for several millenia until being awakened by the vuvuzelas that, as coincidence had it, perfectly replicated the tone and pitch of the queen's buzz.
Incredibly, none of what happened in Durban caused a change in the behavior of World Cup fans in Johannesburg or Capetown. Just as those in Durban had done, they blew their vuvuzelas, awakening similar swarms of prehistoric bees that also put them in sting-induced comas/cocoons.
For the next two weeks, close to two hundred thousand soccer fans from around the world lay in suspended animation within their bee sting cocoons. As much as possible, doctors monitored their status, and, aside from the fact that they were in cocoons, health-wise, everything was relatively normal.
At the next full moon, the cocoons opened suddenly, and everyone emerged, coated with thick, goopy honey. Once that was washed off, it was discovered that they were all perfectly healthy. The only difference was that each person now had a stinger on his or her backside. Not too big, not too small. Just the right size to be sheathed by the very same vuvuzelas that had gotten them into that mess in the first place. In fact, that's what they did. To prevent themselves from accidentally stinging anyone, people with stingers wore their vuvuzelas over the stingers, and held the vuvuzelas in place with belts or rock climbing harnesses. It was a bit unwieldy, but it worked.
And once everyone was satisfied that there were no other major effects of the bee attacks, and once all the remaining bees had been rounded up and placed in labs for further study, and once everyone felt reasonably sure that the bee dangers were behind them, and once the stadiums were repaired, the World Cup resumed.
And undoubtedly, the games were exciting. But without everyone tooting their vuvuzelas, the Cup just didn't generate the same buzz.