This is not the Labor Day weekend I was expecting!
Around the office on Friday, people were wishing each other a good weekend and asking if they had any special plans for the holiday.
My major plan was to do laundry. Probably watch some DVDs. Maybe do some writing and studying Indonesian.
Saturday I answered my door, and as I did so, I noticed a bee buzzing under the Venetian blind, trying to get out of the glass.
“How did that get in here?” I wondered.
I killed it.
A few minutes later I was heading out the door to get what I needed for a home improvement project, when I saw another bee on the Venetian blind on my front door.
I killed it, too.
But wait: Two bees in the same exact place indoors within minutes of each others?
There could be a group.
My mind flashed back to a time when I was out for a lunchtime constitutional and ran across a whole swarm of bees buzzing around a service access duct poking up through the blacktop of a parking lot. (I marched quickly past it and then called the owners to let them know they had a bee hazard in their parking lot.)
So I went out my front door and stood in front of the house, just observing.
A bee went by.
Then my eyes settled on a ventilation duct at the peak of my roof.
It was swarming with bees. I estimate between one and two dozen were visible.
“They must have a colony in my attic,” I realized. So I got ahold of my landlady. I had trouble at first getting her to understand the exact nature of the problem, but I brought her over to see it for herself. When she did, she instantly realized the danger the bees posed.
A colony of potentially hundreds of bees infesting a house, including its living quarters . . . that has possible anaphylactic shock and lawsuit written all over it.
From her perspective.
From my perspective it has possible anaphylactic shock and death written all over it. I don’t have a bee allergy to my knowledge, but then many people who have the allergy don’t know it, and it can develop suddenly, without warning. Also, if a swarm goes after you, you can get stung enough times to have a life-threatening reaction just from the toxicity of the venom, even if you aren’t allergic.
Further, since Africanized “killer” bees have invaded Southern California (killer bees being “killer” only in their aggressiveness, not their toxicity), every untested swarm has to be assumed to be Africanized and thus more likely to attack. Thus I have to assume that I have killer bees living in my attic.
I’m not staying in my house again until those bees are gone!
Unfortunately, it being a holiday weekend, they couldn’t reach the exterminators and probably can’t get anyone to start the (long, complicated) process of bee de-infestation till Tuesday. I estimate that I’m likely not to be able to live in my house for a week or more.
Even when I finally get back in, I won’t be comfortable for a while.
So the bees have forced me to do what the fires last November didn’t: evacuate. At one point when the fires were raging and the world outside looked totally apocalyptic, I had the truck packed and was within five minutes of evacuating, but it didn’t end up being necessary. With possible killer bees infesting my house, though, it is.
I did go back in for a few minutes to get a few essentials, but as I did so I noticed a third bee on my front door’s Venetian blind. It waggled its antennae at me menacingly, so I grabbed far fewer essentials than I originally intended and hustled out of the house as quickly as I could.
Afterward I found myself thinking: “I hope no bees are stowing away in my stuff, ready to crawl out and sting me like what happened to Agent Scully in The X-Files movie.”
This is not surprising.
One day while my husband was in Mission Valley (San Diego)across the way from Trophy’s he noticed people out in the parking lot running like mad into different stores and the restaurant. He said hands were waving about their heads and he couldn’t help but wonder what the heck was going on.
So he takes a look from a window and notices the biggest swarm of bees he has seen in a real long time. So big infact one man who tried to make a mad dash to his car couldn’t and had to turn right back around into Trophy’s because the swarm was just too big.
Finally after an hour or two a small group of men came out in a big truck, donned bee protection suits, and went to the hive with some kind of vaccum to start sucking them out.
I’m sure you won’t have that problem though.
Good luck with your bees 😀
Scary stuff. Bees frighten me.
If I’m not mistaken, it was researched that more American killed because of Bees than any other animals. If that’s not true, at least I think Bees are top 5 animal-caused death
Killer Bees are vicious. I read that Killer Bees will chase you for a half a mile before giving up. How fast can you run 800 meters? Hey, you lost weight so you might have a chance.
Thanks for the well-wishing, folks. The bees are, indeed, scary.
The annoying thing is that I had virtually no time to pack anything (e.g., clothes), so I’m having to buy or do without. I’m hoping that the bee killer guys can grab a few extra things for me when the come (on Tuesday probably, though the treatment is likely to last days).
I’ve been researching bees a lot as a result of the experience. I now know more about them than I ever wanted to–or, at least, than I wanted to under these circumstances.
Turns out the normal European honey bees will chase you for 150 feet (half the length of a football field), while Africanized ones will chase you for 450 feet (three times as long), though some a reported to have chased people for a quarter mile before giving up.
Fortunately, they are slow flyers, comparatively speaking, an most humans can outrun them (unless you get caught in the midst of a whole swarm). Little kids and old people can’t run as fast, and so they are the ones who have the most swarm-related deaths. Adults who aren’t yet elderly have the most allergy-related deaths, ’cause all it takes is one bee to cause that, not a swarm.
It’s kind of surprising that we can out run them. Humans are not known for speed (at least among mammals). What we’re known for is distance: The slow-twitch muscle fibers we have in our legs allow us to run long distances. We can lope along at a slow rate of speed for mile after mile without tiring, whereas faster animals (and Dwarves) poop out and have to rest once their fast-twitch fibers give out.
When I was younger and moved into my own apartment (old farmhouse), I heard buzzing in the ceiling of my room. After a little investigation I discovered there was a whole nest of honey bees, thousands of them, less than an foot away from my head and the only thing separating us was a half an inch of aging plaster. I also discovered them by my room being invaded. After they were killed I kept the honey.
When I was a young boy my father bought me 15 hives of honey bees and we raised them and sold the honey. When I was first getting used to how it all worked I was stung 36 times within 30 minutes. It was painful but I never swelled up or anything.
My dad also built an “observation hive” made out of glass and put it in my bedroom. There was a clear plastic tube that ran from the hive and out through a hole he drilled in my window frame. So I had a hive of real honey bees, queen and all, living and working in my bedroom. I watched the queen lay eggs, the drone mate with her and the worker bees making wax and honey. My dad is 85 now and just as cool as he was when I was a kid.
Good luck with your new buzzing adventure.
Steve Ray
has anyone ever heard of honey dripping through and staining the ceiling below? I don’t know if I have bees but I suspect that I do. The eaves where I believe the nest to be is in an area of the roof that is inaccessible. How can I determine if the sticky drippy stuff is run-off from a hive?