Bee Still

My good friend, Big Liver Girl, had a WAY more interesting week than me. Like, so much interesting that there will be memorial plaques in front of her house and children will sings songs aroung campfires about it.

There has been a distinct buzz around the southeast corner of Big Liver Girl's house lately. Quite literally....she noticed more bees around her back patio recently, and noticed that the bee activity centered around an area where a vine had worked it's way under the siding.

Upon closer examination, she was able to see that the bees had not only gotten INTO the house, they had set up a colony and were secretly plotting a full-scale invasion. Rather than screaming and fainting and selling her house, which would have been my first response, she called her bee guy to come and take a look. (It is telling that she even HAS a bee guy. I wouldn't have the faintest notion who to call if my house had been taken over by a herd of bees, but Big Liver Girl has a bee guy on speed dial. Last year she had a ball of bees in a tree in her backyard, and found a bee guy to take care of it. That is one seriously resourceful woman, if you ask me.)

When the bee guy came, he determined fairly quickly that they had a shitload of bees in between the ceiling of the dining room and the floor of the upstairs bedroom. (By the way, a "shitload" is a very scientific term, meaning "more than a metric tonne", but smaller than "a biblical plague".) Here is the floor of the bedroom, complete with carpet ripped up and floorboards explosed, ready to be torn asunder. Big Liver Girl said that the wood was actually hot right above where the bees were nesting. Her two daughters are admirably unflappable and stoic, but I'm sure even they would have skedaddled right smart if they had known they were sleeping inches from a mass of bees the size of a Buick.

The bee guy pulled up the floor boards to reveal the shitload of bees and.....about five, big honeycombs!

He quickly did what bee guys do, capturing the queen and re-locating her outside (so that all her loyal minions would follow her out of the house and to a bee box with a much more desirable address.) And then he harvested the honey. It was like Winnie-the-Pooh's house on the best day ever.

Big Liver Girl set up a honey-processing plant in the kitchen, which resulted in an impressive lot of beautiful, golden sticky stuff.

Also, it was her 20th wedding anniversary the next day.

My life is infinitely less interesting. Which is okay by me.