Hivectomy (D+92)

Medically speaking, all is well. I had a doctor's appointment yesterday, and my blood counts are great. My followup appointment is a month from now, preceded by a bone marrow biopsy on June 20.

Perhaps sensing the lack of drama, our house came down with an infection of its own. It started on a Tuesday evening 11 days ago, when Jan noticed a lot of bees outside one of our living room windows. Around the same time, we noticed a few bees inside the house, apparently entering through light fixtures. Once we started paying attention, we could hear bees banging against the first floor ceiling from the spaces between the floor joists.

I called an exterminator that night and made an appointment for the next day.

The exterminator looked around, outside and inside. The bees were entering the walls of the house at the northeast corner, at the gap between the brick covering the first floor and the wood siding of the second floor. Again, we could hear them banging around in the spaces between joists. He was getting ready to describe the extermination program when I showed him one of the bees that we had killed inside the house. Hmmm. Might be a honeybee. He took it out to his truck for more careful analysis.

When he came back in, he told me he could not solve our insect problem. The commercial exterminators are not allowed to kill honeybees. He gave me the number of a local honeybee guy.

Talking to the local bee guy, I learned that I could, if I wanted, kill the bees as a homeowner. However, there are several reasons not to do this:

• Honeybees are valuable, pollinating local crops. I'm a big fan of bees. But not in the house.
• Killing a large colony leaves pounds of dead bees in your house, where they will rot and smell.
• Once the bees are dead, they no longer keep the hive cool by fanning their wings, and the wax of the honeycomb melts.
• The melted wax can stain walls and ceilings.
• The honey, now released from the comb and no longer protected by the bees, attracts ants and rodents.

So, the preferred approach is to move the hive. When the hive is in a tree or under eaves, this is fairly easy. When the hive is inside a house's walls, it can be a major project. If the hive is beyond reach behind the bricks, you would have several unhappy choices: remove the brick (costly); remove the hive from the inside of the house (costly, and you get a lot of unhappy bees in your house for a while); exterminate the bees (bad, as explained above).

Bee Guy 1 couldn't come to the house in the next several days, so he referred me to Bee Guy 2. Bee Guy 2 came out on Friday and confirmed what the exterminator had told me: The bees are building a hive within the walls. We hope it's behind the wood of the second floor and not the brick of the first floor. He thinks he can come out over the weekend to pull back wood siding and see what's up.

But he doesn't make it over Memorial Day weekend, having forgotten about other plans. He is not able to make it until Thursday — beekeeping is a relatively recent hobby for him, and he has a full-time job. In the meantime, the bees are making themselves at home. Fortunately, they are happy with their chosen spot within the walls and are no longer scouting out the rest of the house.

This past Thursday, Bee Guy 2 comes over with some scaffolding, his bee suit, empty bee boxes and comb frames. He admits he's a little nervous, and he's only done this once before. Yikes! Fortunately, Bee Guy 1 soon comes to join him. Bee Guy 1, who I call the Bee Whisperer, is the one who doesn't wear gloves and only sometimes wears headgear.

The eventual new home for the hive.

The Bee Whisperer and The Rookie start to pry off the
wood siding.

The smoke calms the bees down, for some reason. It seems
to bother the Bee Guys, though.

Looking west from the northeast corner of the house, behind
the siding, they see a mass of bees clustered on insulation.

They pull out the insulation and look for the hive.

They dump the first load of bees into the box.

Behind the insulation lies the hive.

You can tell the hive is new because the comb is so white.

The Bee Whisperer pulls out sheets of honeycomb (with his
bare hands), and The Rookie puts them into the box. They keep
checking each comb for the queen, because if you don't get
her, your efforts are wasted. The colony will just rebuild where
the queen is.

After all the comb is removed, there is still a mass of bees
huddled between floor joists. The Bee Whisperer coaxes them
onto some newspaper and, thankfully, spots the queen in the mass.
The queen is 50% longer than the rest, but otherwise looks like
a bee. Good eyes!

Once the queen is in the box, along with much of the comb,
the box becomes the colony's new home.

In the end, this worked out as well as it could have. They were behind the wood and not behind the brick, the hive was all within arm's reach, the queen and her colony were relocated to a box, and The Rookie got a new hive. Everybody is happy, except possibly the wife of The Rookie.