Hive got a story for you

A week ago we saw the first bee.

I discovered it as I was getting dressed Tuesday morning.  It was making love to the glow of my bedside lamp, and as it circled around and dipped in and out of the shade, I became increasingly anxious.  I hate bees.  Bees have anger management issues and any creature that will purposely disembowel itself when it’s pissed at you is one I give a very wide berth.

The bee eventually found it’s way to the screen of our bedroom window and I quickly shut the window to trap it.  Being the humane bee-hater that I am, I then pulled down the top pane to allow the bee to escape back outside.  Only when I pushed the top pane back up did I discover the second bee that I effectively decapitated in the process of freeing the first.  His antennae were still twitching in spite of being cut in two and I ran away shrieking from his postmortem seizures.

I didn’t give a second thought as to how the bee got in the house.  I have a three year-old who likes to linger in open doorways like Blanche Dubois and we’re always shooing away some flying, buzzing something or other she inadvertently let in.  The next morning, however, we were visited by three more bees.  Our random bee visitation was turning into something more serious and a quick look outside told us all we needed to know.  There, on the roof above our bedroom, was a swarm of bees hovering over an unseen hive.  It looked like air traffic over O’Hare and they were somehow getting into our house.

I called an exterminator as soon as I got to work.  They were the same people who took care of our carpenter ant problem three years ago and they quoted a hefty $186 to kill the hive.  I was all, whatever you have to do, man. Just get rid of the damn things.  My humane spirit can only go so far.

Nathan was equally freaked because he thinks he’s allergic to bees.  He said he once was stung over 300 times so I think he’s mistaking an allergy with a phobia, but the bottom line was that neither of us were willing to sleep in the bedroom until the bees were gone.  The exterminators told us nighttime was the only time all the bees are in the hive so we let them have the room for a night and pulled our mattress into the living room.

Thursday the exterminator came out to dust the hive.  After he was done, he told Nathan the bees should be gone by the next morning so we returned the mattress to our bedroom. That night, at 3:30 in the morning,  we were awakened by buzzing.  Several bees, drunk and dying from the exterminator’s chemicals, had found their way into our room.  One was still able to fly but the others were just barely clinging to life.  One crawled over a shirt in Nathan’s closet while another convulsed on the floor, angrily thrusting out his abdomen in search of something to plunge his stinger into.

Over the next two days I discovered that’s how bees die.  They’re angry right up to the very end and our bedroom served as their burial ground.  Friday I came home from work to find no less than a dozen dead and dying bees in our windowsill and on our bedroom floor.  We pulled the mattress back out of the room and slept in the living room yet again.

Throughout the weekend Autumn would only approach our room while holding a fly swatter.  She dubbed our bedroom “the bug room” and a couple of times broke down into hysterics when a seemingly dead bee started twitching again.  Yeah, honey, that skeeved me out, too.

We never did nail down their exact point of entry, but we have not had any unwelcome guests since Sunday.  The last two or three bees found their way inside only to become balled-up husks as the chemicals did their work.

Still, it will be awhile before I dare walk around the bedroom in my bare feet.

Tagged as: bees