Friday, May 29, 2009

Our Sweet Dilemma


A few years ago, when Kris and I first moved into our house we noticed a little bit of bee action going on over by the bay window attached to the master bedroom. In all honesty, the house is too old to have a "real" master bedroom, it's really just the larger room on the main floor. Larger by about 4 inches. Anyway, there were these bees busily buzzing and doing what bees do best. We really didn't think to much about it because what could possibly be bad about having some honeybees on our property.

The following summer they disappeared. POOF. No more bees. Not one. Which made our lives a lot easier since we didn't know the first thing about extracting hives from our bedroom walls. We assumed it was part of the whole Bees Disappearing Phenomenon and continued with our lives as usual.

Big Mistake.

Last summer they reappeard. VOILA. Hundreds of bees swarming around one corner of our window.

One fine summer day Kris and I were standing inside watching the bees and wondering what the hell we are going to do about it when Kris came up with an idea, more of an experiment to see how big the hive is. So he pops out to the garage and returns with a drill and proceeds to carve a hole in the wall beneath the window which would be about 5' below the bee's point of entry outside. Lo and behold, honey dripped out of the wall. ACTUAL HONEY. The drill bit was covered in honey. Kris tasted it and it tasted like honey. So, we realized that our small problem was now quite a huge problem. After pressing our ears to the wall we were able to figure out the majority of the space the bees were borrowing without our permission. It's quite extensive. We can't hang pictures on one wall of our room for several reasons: 1) the 70 year-old lathe and plaster crumbles if you so much as breathe too deeply so you can imagine what a small nail would do. You wouldn't believe the size of the holes I had to patch when we first moved in you would of thought the previous owners were using softballs to hang art. 2) we have the world's largest fucking bee hive living in our house.

So we shopped around for ways to get them removed without gassing the shit out of them since honeybees are practically an endangered species and all. Except there don't seem to be any options for people who want to remove a hive without damaging it. All anyone wanted to do was tear an enormous hole in our house, terminate the bees or else take them for their own honey laundering business, and leave us to rebuild half of our bedroom. All for a small fortune akin to sending your first and second born to an Ivy League Institution. Now I understand that these bees can't live in our walls forever, that just isn't practical but I firmly believe there has to be more reasonable options than the onese we have been presented with. I just don't know what they are. Yet.

As of this very moment the bees are still living in our house and it's pretty apparent they have no intention of moving out anytime soon without some very serious coaxing.

Crap.

Poppies







Monday, May 4, 2009

Tripping through the Tulips


In the midst of our lives, we must find the magic that makes our souls soar