I was going to go medieval on David Brooks, but thank FSM, John got there first (and to the relief of everyone, I’m sure, at about 1/10th the length it would have taken me to vent my spleen on that embarassment to my craft).
So, instead, I get to focus on more charming news, like now we’re supposed to bow in awe at a yield of 250 lbs of honey from the White House hive. And yeah, it’s pretty cool that they’re drinking homebrew at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
But folks, I can top that.
When we bought the house we now live in a couple of years ago, one of the unexpected bits of home repair that followed became necessary when we discovered this:
That’s five feet of hive, folks, inside an interior wall in my house, home to from 40-70,000 bees.
When the nice man came to remove our co-tenants…
…we found plenty of action, and plenty of comb:
But at least I can say, alone of everyone on my block, I’ve eaten honey out of my own wall. Tasted fine too, less sweet than store-bought, with almost a spicy edge. Cuvée Boston, perhaps.
So, Balloon Juicers, consider this a challenge (one I’m sure will be met): top this for a home improvement/home disaster story…or anything else your openly threading minds may desire.
Keith
Is that a picture of Billy The Exterminator?
Downpuppy
We uns is looking in Melrose. Made an offer; somebody else offered more. Since then, every house has had major sinkholes.
Why is Melrose falling into the center of the Urf?
PeakVT
I had a crazy amount of batshit rain down on me when I took out a ceiling on the second floor a couple of homes back. Seriously.
Geoduck
About the worst one I have encountered was when the light in our dining room kept burning out bulbs. So my dad and I go up in the attic, and discover that a previous owner had “installed” the light fixture by hanging it from a rafter with, literally, a string.
robertdsc-PowerBook
Given my lifelong aversion to bees due to allergy, the idea of finding 5 feet of hive inside my new house is too sickening to contemplate.
Insomniac
@Downpuppy: Sinners.
MikeJ
The beekeeper used that machine so that the Red Sox wouldn’t be the only thing in Boston that sucks in September.
JPL
Tom, That was some expensive honey.
RossInDetroit
Red squirrels. Our house is surrounded by huge spruce trees that produce thousands of cones every year. These are irresistible to red squirrels, which are instinctive hoarders. Great place to hoard: our attics. I’ve been over the roofs on this house with screen and nails trying to keep them out, but every fall the little noises upstairs as they stash their winter food.
One brief pleasure was chasing one out of the space over the garage and seeing a Cooper’s Hawk swoop down and pick it off.
kdaug
This will devolve into Cole’s story about getting stuck on his roof and making his neighbor call his mom to get him down, won’t it?
J
Wow, that is nuts. How did you discover them? Could you hear them?
Elizabelle
Completely OT, but our President is learning (re naming important stuff).
NYTImes news alert: President Obama to Seek Higher Tax Rate on Millionaires
He’s calling it the Buffett Rule.
Methinks David Brooks and our generously compensated Villagers are having an early cocktail hour.
I notice it says “making”, not “earning.”
That might hurt.
JGabriel
Why remove the combs if the honey was safe to eat? The hive is already walled off, just put in a tap. Maybe seal off the inner wall to make sure they only use the outside exits, and add some extra piping with a little heater so you can have hot & cold running honey! Add a fermentation system and wallah! Mead!
.
sb
JGabriel
@Downpuppy:
Karma?
.
Loneoak
We just got done with a bathroom demo and rebuild due to a rotten patch of floor. I had heard some critters scurrying around under the house, but was not expecting the giant rats nest that had been established in the open space between the tub and wall. The guys who built the bathroom never bothered to seal the space along the drainpipe and it was the pecect size for rats. This may be related to the half dozen empty bottles of bottom shelf liquor they left in the walls behind the drywall.
JGabriel
@PeakVT:
Guano deposits! Call a phosphate company immediately and you’ll be rich, rich I tell ya!
.
MikeJ
Oh what we would have given for 70,000 bees in the walls. When I was a child we had to live in a badger pit with a sex dwarf, and glad have it we were.
RossInDetroit
Hellmouth.
SiubhanDuinne
@Elizabelle:
Get it to the House pronto before Louis Gohmert creates his own Buffett Rule eliminating taxes on the rich forever.
Martin
@RossInDetroit: They make an expanding foam insulation that you can use to close up cracks that is impregnated with capsaicin. It’s wicked spicy, and they won’t try to gnaw through. Just go up one day and seal anywhere that light penetrates.
But yeah, bees – I can’t beat that.
Loneoak
I should clarify that by rats nest I mean a cubic meter of shredded insulation and rat shit. It stuck up the whole house until I sprayed a half gallon of bleach over the striped surfaces.
Loneoak
I wonder if PeakVT has matoko living in his attic.
Warren Terra
@Loneoak:
Please to clarify: when you say “they”, do you mean the construction workers, or the rats?
Downpuppy
Despite all teh horrors, Melrose is a quite upstanding place. Nice mix of houses and apartments, fine, decent citizens & a pretty lake with ducks & swans in the middle.
But every house has at least a 20 degree slant to the floor.
There ain’t no justice.
Warren Terra
@MikeJ:
obligatory Youtube clip.
JimS
Ah yes, rotten patch of floor that leads to checking the basement…. Termites, we had to remove the floor from about half the house and replace. The months living in half the house and being able see directly into the basement from bedroom door was just delightful. Ah well years later I can look back and still shudder….
Downpuppy
@Loneoak: A stick up! What were the rat’s demands?
JPL
@Loneoak: I took down some paneling and replaced it with sheet rock. I came across an old rat’s nest that destroyed a small section of insulation. Rather than buy a roll of insulation I rolled up newspapers and stuffed the section the old fashion way. I live in GA and at some point, a wingnut will buy my house and discover the NYTimes in the wall. Or at least that’s my intent.
RossInDetroit
Bees. I was once called on to rescue a group of kids on a school playground who had disturbed a hive of bees. What I was expected to do about angry bees I do not know. But I told the teachers to get the kids inside while I held the bees off with a garden hose. Simple, right? Well, the kids were required by policy to all stand still and quiet at the doors before they could go inside. Not a problem for 9 year olds, unless they’re being dive bombed by wet, angry bees.
I’m all for rules but let’s be reasonable here. If you’re about to get stung, run like hell.
Loneoak
Stuck, stunk, it’s all the same on a phone keypad.
trollhattan
Neighbors had a garage bee wall that was packed pretty darn full, but I don’t have a competitive measurement so five feet remains the extant record.
The fun thing was in winter the wall was warm from all those bees packed inside, and if you put your hand on it you could feel it buzz.
Must add that when we remodeled our kitchen an interior wall was packed full of…junk by rats. (Packrats?) The most common item was little glass ant bait bottles, so maybe they were irony rats?
Linda Featheringill
@MikeJ:
LOL! I really wasn’t expecting that one!
[and when I was a kid . . . . ] :-)
Samara Morgan
@Loneoak: hardly. im not that low rent.
Allahpundit weeps.
Two weeks ago, it was Perry 44, Obama 41. Today, Obama 46, Perry 39.
JPL
@Downpuppy: What a sweet story. Dropping turkeys on the floor must be a MA thing. When I was a teenager while all the relatives were in the other room, I was helping my mother and she dropped the turkey on the floor and quietly said, “no one will ever know”. She was right, the turkey was delicious.
trollhattan
@Linda Featheringill:
I think the proper response is, “Badger pit, sex dwarf? Sheer luxury!”
Yutsano
@JPL: That famous culinarian Julia Child had a saying:
No one cares about the process of food, only the final results.
General Stuck
Doobies – South City Midnight Lady
Gravenstone
Our neighbor where I grew up was this sweet little widow who rambled around in the huge farmhouse where she had raised her family. In her later years, she chose to only live downstairs, not having used the upper story for nearly 20 years before her passing. Her son sold the house off once she passed, with the provision that it be moved since he wanted to keep the land/farm. When they went upstairs in preparation for all this, they discovered the upstairs had been taken over by a few raccoon families. The mucking out was notably unpleasant, I am told. But they ultimately cleaned and salvaged the place and the new owners moved it a lot carved out of the edge of the original farmland.
wrb
Well… we had an orchard full of bears.
It was a pioneer orchard, bedraggled , many broken branches.
First year in the fall the dos took to barking up there. As soon as I get there they start wagging stop pointing at whatever had caused their upset. I look around, don’t see anything. Then WHUMP! A bear falls from the sky four feet in front of me. He takes off running.
Catching my breath I start to hear it.
“Crunch, crunch, beeelllch, crunch, crunch, crunch, faRRRTTTT crunch, splop.”
It was coming from everywhere. The trees were alive with the sound of bears and bear digestion.
but… No one cares about the process of food, only the final results.
Turned into a nice orchard. Every tree was a different old variety.
RoonieRoo
1 week after moving into the first house I owned the entire frame of the front door with the door just fell out of the wall one day.
It turned out the house had a ton of termite damage. I had bought the house from a 93 year old lady and had paid for 3 independent inspections. The ladies children had done great “repair” on the walls to hide all the damage and then they flat out lied about the damage.
I sued her (wasn’t that a lovely feeling – suing an old lady in a nursing home.) Anyway, they said they wouldn’t pay for all the repair and would happily go to court.
I spent the next several days calling every exterminator in the city until I found the one that had treated the house. He happily sent me copies of the files including a map of the house marking all the termite damage that was signed by the little old lady! Ha!
My real estate agent went to her lawyer’s office when the lady and her kids were there to deliver a copy of the map and encourage her to settle and pay. My lawyer was my dad, a real estate attorney.
Anyway, apparently her lawyer told her and the kids that they needed to just suck it up and pay for all the repair and settlement since a) I had the map with their signature proving they lied and b) my lawyer was my dad and I didn’t have legal fees.
The repair they paid for was to literally remove the sheet rock for every single wall, repair all the damaged studs, re-sheet rock the whole house and repaint.
trollhattan
@wrb:
Zowie. And Sully might well have sung: “It’s raining bears, hallelujah it’s raining BEARS!”
JPL
@Tom Levenson, Your photographs are wonderful.
mem from somerville
Oh…all I can see is beeswax for candles….
In my house we had to have an inspection for the blown-in style insulation (which is frikken wicked awesome, by the way). In the attic there were these wires and connectors that we didn’t know about. The inspector goes “Well, those were installed by Mr. Edison and his boys….” So we had to sign a waiver that we wouldn’t sue if there were issues with the knob-and-tube wiring sparking out in contact with this insulation.
That was about the most exciting thing. So far.
handy
@JGabriel:
Mmmm. Guano bowls. Collect the whole set.
Elizabelle
I guess the bee in wall crisis occurred a few years before the general public got worried about bees’ absence?
Because you could have been ahead of your time, starting a home-based bee sanctuary movement. All the finest, greenest homes would have them.
And you could have branched out to offering beeswax candles formed in the likeness of famous scientists and secular humanists. Into honey-based soaps and potables.
And home-brewed mead. From one’s very own resident hives.
How cool would that be?
wrb
@wrb:
WP wouldn’t let me edit. Sorry about the typos
and a line was missing from this part:
“It was coming from everywhere. The trees were alive with the sound of bears and bear digestion.
The grass was slick with applesauce.
but… one cares about the process of food, only the final results.“
Loneoak
Matoko, you may claim to not be that low rent, but you are that batshit.
Skepticat
And they say that there’s been a crash in the honeybee population. Perhaps because they’re all in the Levenson house?
Can’t beat that story, but I’d be happy to trade your honeybees for my carpenter bees and carpenter ants. My subtenants don’t leave behind anything as appetizing as yours.
Tom Levenson
@JGabriel: The problem was that if anything happened to the hive (a virus that killed it or whatever) you’d have many pounds of wax and honey melting down two stories. Nothing good there. Also – the bees got into the wall in the first place because of a hole in the eaves. We actually only discovered the hive by tracing up the pattern of rot from the water that had dripped in through a silver dollar size fissure in the skin of the house. Had to go.
@JPL: Rather.
@MikeJ: FTW!
@trollhattan: Indeed.
Halteclere
An uncle of mine once got up into the attic of his old house to do some repairs, and found several dozen snake skins. Living on a farm, he said he always wondered why he never saw mice around!
RossInDetroit
Mark Frauenfelder (Boing Boing, Make magazine) keeps bees and chickens among many DIY hobbies.
THE
Had wasps in the wall at one point. They looked a lot like your bees except the hexagonal combs were made of some sort of brown, papery-fibrous stuff and no honey.
THE
Oh and ringtail possums are very common in the roofs in my part of the world.
Davis X. Machina
@RossInDetroit: There was an absolutely believed-in old-wives’-tale at the parochial elementary school I went to back in the Pleistocene that if you stuck your tongue out, bees and such wouldn’t sting you, and this belief persisted right up until the day we were all lined up to come in from recess early one fall, prime yellow-jacket season, and Janet Rowan got stung — on the tongue.
I’ve been a cynic ever since.
RossInDetroit
@THE:
That’s a cute possum! We have ugly ones. We have to call them ‘evil rat pigs’ because the dog knows the word ‘possum’ and goes berserk.
RossInDetroit
@Davis X. Machina:
That old wives’ tale is probably 99.9% true. It’s also 99.9% true that they won’t sting you if you don’t stick out your tongue. I’m around stinging insects a lot. I see more kids getting hurt running away from them than actually get stung.
RossInDetroit
Worst bee sting story: riding a motorcycle at speed on a narrow country road. I WATCHED as a bee flew right up the unzipped sleeve of my jacket. Couldn’t stop. Couldn’t pull over. I just had to wait, feeling it crawl up into my armpit, where it stung me.
If I had crashed and died from that I’m sure I would have gone to Hell. There must be a rule excluding from paradise anyone who dies that dumb.
RossInDetroit
Though there’s the time that a wasp flew into my helmet as I was merging onto the freeway at rush hour, flew around my face, nailed me on the lip and flew out again.
Bill Arnold
Growing up, had a big bee colony in walls of a little finished outbuilding my folks had. (a “summer canning cottage”, about 12-16 ft, built before air conditioning.) The local beekeeper couldn’t get them to vacate and they had to kill the colony. We noticed it because there was obvious bee traffic to and from the entrance. Father had previously kept bees but developed a severe allergy and had to stop, so we were attuned to bee behavior. Yes, you could hear them in the walls.
The spookiest bee-related episode I recall was seeing a swarm (from one of my father’s hives) traveling overhead, about 20 feet up. I recall it as a loud mass of flying bees (it would have been several thousand bees at least), that you could see through, about 5 feet in diameter, moving about 10 miles per hour. It settled on a branch temporarily and a local beekeeper collected it.
Tom Levenson
@RossInDetroit: Someone’s sending you a message. Third time and all that…
trollhattan
@RossInDetroit:
There would have been a hella lot of headscratching among the investigators!
I was riding the Davis Double Century (bicycle ride) and managed to scoop some stingie thing into my jersey, where it walked around stinging me again and again, every time in a different spot. I stripped off my jersey, while still riding, and shook it out. Didn’t even have a chance to kill the little bastard.
Also, too, caught a honey bee in the neck at 70 on my motorcycle. It somehow managed to sting me while turning into bug goo, which I didn’t know for awhile because the impact itself hurt so much.
Also, also, too, discovered to my horror a dragonfly can bite a hunk out of your skin should you happen to collide with one on a bicycle, and the bite will become very infected. Ah, wilderness.
cckids
Well, when we bought our house in Henderson, NV, (15 or so years ago), we noticed that every couple of months we’d see a plumbing/repair truck outside one or the other neighbor’s houses, up & down the block, and/or a tub enclosure or dumpster full of tiles out for the garbage. Couldn’t figure out why everyone seemed to be renovating their bathrooms all the time. Then we started noticing the odor of mildew around our showers. When we took the tile out, the entire back drywall behind the tiles in the showers was black with mold (in the 2 upstairs bathrooms). As we joined in the rehab party, we found the ONE homeowner on the block who’d bought the home new (in late 1988).
Turns out the housing development had been 80% or so finished when the PepCon plant blew up in 1988:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K0cEX9ex3U
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPCON_disaster
Our neighbor told us that even though that explosion was 12 miles from the houses, it cracked seals on windows, blew out many doors, damaged stucco & siding, and, it turns out, created “microcracks” in the grout of the showers, which gave them all essentially slow leaks. Everyone who had already bought a house at the time of the explosion got all those things replaced. The houses that hadn’t yet been purchased got some half-assed patchwork & then were sold, leaving everyone down the road to do their own detective work & figure out why this stuff was falling apart. Since our house had passed through 2 buyers before us, we were out of luck.
It did inspire me to look into the PepCon explosion, though. I vaguely remembered seeing the news when it happened, but watching the video of it–holy crap, it is hard to believe only 2 people died.
different church-lady
I think if it had been my house I would have gotten a big sheet of plexiglass and some molding and made one hell of a piece of living wall art out of that.
RossInDetroit
Once while bicycling I had a bee fly up the back of my shorts and sting me right on the ass. I headed to the nearest house with my Swiss army knife, borrowed the bathroom and scraped the stinger off. Those were very puzzled people.
I’ve been stung enough times I’m getting shock reactions now and need ster0ids if I get nailed bad.
khead
Same here.
Last week, lightning struck our townhouse row. We are still not exactly sure which house was directly hit but we think it was next door. (BTW, this was after the earthquake and then the hurricane that caused us to lose power for 6 days.)
Fried the ethernet ports on all ethernet connected computers and also the cable and phone modems. I feel kinda lucky though since the folks next door lost all their electronics…
This is the second time we’ve been hit. Lightning hit the apartment building we lived in before moving here too.
JGabriel
@khead:
Note to self: Never rent or buy housing on the same power grid as khead.
.
Halteclere
Speaking of bees, when honeybees swarm due to a hive splitting (outgrowing the existing hive), they don’t sting. My father and I tried to capture the second queen of his dividing hive by me climbing a tree 10′ in the air and attempting to place a burlap bag over the huge swarm of bees hanging from the branch (second queen was in the middle of that swarm somewhere). I had bees all over me, almost like when those guys grow bee “beards”.
Unfortunately in the process of positioning myself in the tree I shook the limb too hard, scattering the swarm, and then the new hive flew off before we could re-identify where the queen was (just capture the queen an all the other bees will follow).
Skip Schloss
I had a house nearly burn to the ground because of bees in the wall. It was a log house, with some cracks, the bees came and went through the cracks.
The problem was that the hive was built around a light fixture. I’d heard buzzing in the wall, had NO idea what that meant…
One day the hive shorted out the light fixture, and the hive started smoldering. I was at my office in town, the neighbors saw smoke and called the fire department, the smoke broke into flames just as the fire department arrived. They got the fire put out before the house was lost, but the entire house had to be gutted and rebuilt because of the smoke damage.
I was in my office on a tech support call when one of my co-workers took a call, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You’d better switch to this call, it’s the Fire Department, your house is on fire.” That will get your attention.
I walked through the remains with the fire inspector, it was clear from the burned logs where the fire had started, and there was the massive, semi-toasted bee hive in the wall.
He said, “Well, I’m not putting down Bees in the Wall as the cause of the fire. I’m calling it electrical failure.”
Tom Levenson
@Skip Schloss: You win. Or lose.
ericblair
@cckids:
Actually, it must have blown out the bottom seal around the drain: grout, tile, and cement board are NOT waterproof. They’ll all leak a little, and rely on plastic in the walls and a shower pan that are actually waterproof. Of course, many contractors don’t bother too much with things that people can’t see, so lots of crappy showers out there with mold and leaking problems because they weren’t built properly.
Cute possum. In Virginny we have the Not Cute Possums, which look like rats on meth and act like rats on dope.
THE
Australian ringtail possums are nocturnal, fruit eating marsupials. Lots of people feed them; they are easy to tame.
I often see them “tightrope walking” along overhead powerlines as I walk around local suburbs, just after dark. Their prehensile tails give them amazing agility.
Someone’s posted a nice video here.
Cat Lady
@RossInDetroit:
Reminds me of the passage in Stephen King’s The Shining where the main character muses about how many unexplained fatal single car accidents are because there’s a bee in the car, and after the car crashes the bee flies away and it’s ruled a suicide. I’ve never forgotten it.
statzilla
Having moved to the frozen tundra of upstate NY two years ago, we decided last year to put new insulation into the attic. Prior to the guy blowing in the stuff, we started digging around to get out the old “insulation” under the attic floor. What we found were newspapers and magazines from December…1939. Yep, balled up dead trees insulated our house for 70 years.
Sadie
Several years ago while on a bike ride a bee flew into my husband’s mouth and stung him. Turns out he was allergic and went into shock. We were out in the sticks but on a supported ride. Fortunately two doctors were riding slower than us and stopped to help. An ambulance eventually came and took us to the hospital. The good news was that during the treatment for the bee allergy he was diagnosed with an arrhythmia which he subsequently had repaired at USCMC. His GP had previously diagnosed it as panic attacks! Bees are good news and bad news in our family.
RossInDetroit
@statzilla:
Our house was built in ’39 as well. I was doing some wiring in the attic space and found an empty Chesterfield pack, which I carefully preserved.
TrishB
@statzilla: I’m originally from the tundra, but found it odd when my parents moved to the Cincinnati area. The 1825 house they moved into had a mixture of chicken feathers and shredded newspaper between the brick and the wall paper.
The Truffle
Oooh! Oooooooh! I have a good one!
My family once had about three cats. One was a brown tiger tabby named Lily. Lily tended to get into strange predicaments. For example:
One winter, Mom decided to replace the floor in the upstairs bathroom, warning the carpenter that she had three cats who liked to run around a lot.
That evening, Mom noticed that Lily was nowhere to be found. She stuck her head out the door and called Lily’s name. No Lily. She searched the house, calling Lily’s name. No Lily.
My uncle, who was staying over, joked “I bet that cat got nailed under the bathroom floor Ha ha ha!”
Mom didn’t think this was so funny.
That night, my uncle stayed up watching the Tonight Show downstairs in the family room. At about 1 am, he heard a meowing noise coming from the ceiling.
He ran upstairs to Mom’s room. “Jean!” he said. “Remember when I joked about Lily getting nailed in the floor? Well, it’s not a joke!”
Luckily, there was a drill lying around somewhere, and so my brother was awakened at about 1:30 to the sound of Mom drilling a hole in the new bathroom floor. The noise frightened Lily so badly that she scampered off to hide somewhere under the floorboard.
By now, Mom is getting more and more worried. Lily has not eaten anything for hours and won’t come out. To make things even worse, Mom has to call and explain why she can’t go into work that day. And noboy has had any sleep since about 1:30 AM.
At around noon, someone gets the genius idea to put a bowl of tuna fish next to the hole in the bathroom floor. Sure enough, Lily pokes her head out from the hole and is quickly lifted into the air.
Mom, meanwhile, has to call the carpenter and tell him that the bathroom floor has to be, uh, redone.
Despite her trauma, Lily didn’t seem to have suffered. She eventually lived to be around 13 or so and died in 1997. . .of natural causes.
RossInDetroit
@Sadie:
Stung in the mouth is serious. A number of people die or are seriously injured every year while drinking canned beer outdoors. Wasps will fly into the can and sting the drinker when they put it to their mouth. If you happen to be, say, fishing alone and your throat swells shut, that’s all she wrote.
Tim in SF
I watched the Vanishing of the Bees last night on Netflix. Here’s the link if you have Netflix streaming:
http://movies.netflix.com/WiSearch?oq=Vanishing+of+the+Bees&ac_posn=-1&v1=Vanishing+of+the+Bees&search_submit=
Have you considered moving those bees to a hive in your backyard? Beekeeping is apparently a fun hobby.
No one of importance
@RossInDetroit:
Oh yeah. they’re really cute when they’re running and down your ceiling at midnight, or making love on top note.
We don’t have possums in our roof, thank goodness. But we do have fruit bats in our backyard tree. Australian mammals are *incredibly* noisy.
HeartlandLiberal
We had a honey bee colony behind the sidewall between two crossbeams under the third floor of our house for about 5 years. They came and went through small openings under the small deck outside outside bedroom.
We had two bee keepers come out, but both took one look at how high up the colony was, and never returned our calls again.
The colony even spawned off two swarms three years ago. I got great pics of the two swarms over two days hanging in my dwarf cherry tree in the back yard.
Finally, earlier this year, we noticed that the bees had not resumed there constant flights in and out when the weather warmed up. We called in a couple of guys who ran a housing siding installation and repair company. They cautiously climbed their ladders after watching for a while to make sure the bees were not active despite out claims.
They carefully peeled back the siding, and scooped about 12 square feet of comb (as laid out on the grass in the back yard). They then sealed the siding back up, and grouted and sealed the h*ll out of the area under the deck.
Sadly, most of the comb was old and blackened, and even the most recent newer comb was inedible and unusable. But at least the bees had finally left the building.
abo gato
About 15 years ago I had the bright Idea of having bees. We did some research, bought two hives, contacted a bee keeper in S. Texas and bought a starter set of bees. (There was a word for that which escapes me right now) Drove to Mathis, Texas to pick them up. (Thought all the way home to San Antonio about what a great car wreck claim that would be….Suburban goes off road because the honey bees inside, got out and stung the driver and passenger). Anyway, for the first year it was great. The bees came and went, we enjoyed watching them. They fertilized the shit out of our tomatoes, the tangerine tree, the pear tree. All was good. Got a couple of gallons of really interesting honey out of that. Dark, very tasty, not super sweet. It was like a very concentrated honey. Then, we found out we were supposed to replace the queen every year or so. We ordered one, she was dead when we got her. Kind of started to neglect the bees. They became africanized, due to our neglect. When we realized that, we knew we needed to kill the hive. They stung the crap out of my husband (good thing he was not allergic) he swole up like a toad and cursed the bees for a long time.
Foolish us, reading the story about the White House honey bees, he remarked yesterday that we ought to try it again. I’m crazy enough to do it. I have one 16 ounce container of that old honey left that I’ve been saving. I would love to have some more.
wrb
@abo gato:
We found a swarm once. Got a hive, put them in it, put it in the orchard.
Bears ate them. That night.
Death Panel Truck
Wallah!?
Seriously?
You could have consulted Wiktionary, and voilà! There it is.
I guess it’s better than “Walla!” I read that in a column in an Idaho paper years ago. As someone who lives 47 miles from Walla Walla, I cannot begin to tell you how seriously stupid that sounds when read aloud.
donnah
My aunt and uncle in West Virginia have been plagued by ladybugs, or whatever the imported monsters are that look like ladybugs. Every fall, they would invade their house, covering exterior walls and windows. There would always be expired ones lying inside the window sills, sometimes dozens of them.
My aunt and uncle decided to replace the vinyl siding on their house this spring, after about fifteen years. They started to pull the upper strips off and triggered a veritable landslide of dead and still living ladybugs. There were so many at the bottom of the wall when they finished that they had to use a snow shovel to move them. UGH!
Original Lee
Heh. My beehive was bigger than your beehive.
We were renting at the time, so I don’t know if it counts. One sunny early spring day, I was sitting on the balcony outside the master bedroom, which was in third story of a townhome, when I heard a noise very similar to several semi trucks with studded tires driving very fast on a highway. Then I saw the swarm apparently heading straight at me, but it veered a little just before it got to the balcony and went – zip – right into the air conditioner vent. I was pretty astonished – among other things, the swarm looked almost identical to a Warner Brothers cartoon swarm – but duly called the landlord to report a swarm in the air conditioner.
The landlord sent out a maintenance person, who bravely opened the air conditioner and didn’t find any bees at all. So as far as the landlord was concerned, that was that. OTOH, we could sit on the balcony and see the bees going in and out of the air conditioner vent, and after about 6 weeks, we couldn’t sit on the balcony any more without getting bees in our hair or food.
Then it came time to turn on the air conditioner. The bees were not disturbed at all. But by July we started getting the occasional flash frozen bee in the house. They apparently were getting sucked into the actual air ducts somehow, and after many adventures were blown onto the floor under the vent closest to the air conditioning unit. They were pretty upset when they thawed out. So we called the landlord again. This time he sent a pest control person. This person removed a couple of old paper wasp nests from the eaves and wandered away. So we still had bees in the air conditioner.
At this point, we called the county agricultural service and talked to them about our problem. They gave us a list of reputable beekeepers, we called one, and he came out to take a look. At this point we needed to call the landlord again because the beekeeper wanted access to the attic, which we did not have keys to. The landlord was pretty exasperated but came over, we promised to pay the costs of hive removal in full (because it’s illegal to exterminate bees, no pest control person would handle it), and set the date to get rid of our guests.
The beekeeper hauled out at least 150 pounds of honey and comb, plus all of the bees he could vacuum up. He said our hive was in the 100,000-150,000 range and it was a good thing we had called him when we did because the attic floor was starting to buckle where the hive was. The bees were landing on the little lip of the air intake for the air conditioner and had found a big enough gap to crawl up inside the wall, which they had done until they got into the attic, where they were starting to branch out a bit. We were sad to see the bees go, because our air conditioner was obviously in a great location for them (all that honey!). The beekeeper only charged us $50 and later gave us two small jars of honey from that hive. We also had to pay to finish the cleanup, but it was worth it.
Original Lee
Correction: 350 pounds of honey and comb. In about 5 months.
slag
Well, depending on what ended up happening to the bees, they may have you beat as far as home disaster stories go.
Mike D.
Just two responses: 1) I can already hear my partner’s screaming upon find out that these unwanted guests were living with us in our newly-purchased home.
And 2) This is why I just flat-out don’t believe in homeownership. You couldn’t pay me enough to have to be on the hook for having to deal with this type of shit both financially and physically. Don’t care if I never own a house.