Dahl Study: Royal Jelly

My author study of Roald Dahl started with a reading of his Collected Stories while watching the accompanying episode of Tales of the Unexpected. Each Friday I'll recap a story and show (with spoilers, just so you know), but I encourage you to read and watch them on your own if you're interested!

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"Royal Jelly" from Collected Stories (read 1/9/19)

I had no clue what this one would be about, but once I started, I was hooked. A beekeeper is reading about royal jelly in a magazine. Royal jelly is made by bees to make a queen rich and healthy, and studies have been done on rats with similar results. When the beekeeper and his wife have a baby after nine years of trying, they are upset that she is rapidly losing weight. The wife is stressed, and when her husband drones on and on about royal jelly, she keeps picturing him as a bee excitedly buzzing around. Her husband reveals that he has been feeding the baby royal jelly, which helped her grow rapidly. The wife is pleased, but then gets worried. The husband reveals he has been taking it, too - that's how they finally had a baby after nine years of trying!

"Royal Jelly" from Tales of the Unexpected (viewed 1/9/19)

This started off like the story, but the beekeeper gave an interview on TV instead of reading about royal jelly in a magazine. It made me wonder why it took him so long to use royal jelly with his daughter, since he knew about it and had been using it on himself already. The ending is pretty hokey, with the man slurring his "s"s into "zzzz"s and the end fading out with a weird screen effect and a scream, like a cheaply made YouTube clip. Check it out on my Instagram account and let me know what you think!