Honey Bee Palooza! The script for another horror film. A most productive weekend.

When we showed up at the farmhouse this past weekend, there was an estimate for work that was 25% higher than we originally anticipated. We were dejected, let down, and morale was pretty low. We felt hopeless and overwhelmed.

Then we met a man that defines kindness, selflessness and all that is good in the world.

His name is Frank, and he likes bees. He came to help us relocate bees that have made a home in our attic walls. These bees make anyone that comes to bid on jobs a bit nervous. In all fairness, we can't expect anyone to come work on a house alongside a swarm of bees.

Here he is!

Listening for bees in the walls. Let me tell you, the sound is a bit like a horror film. Super scary. Frank told us there could be 100, 10,000 or 40,000 bees in the wall. The sound was exciting and a bit disturbing at the same time. You could just tell there were a ton of them in there.

Looking...

Frank came over the next day at 6am. Before sunrise, while the bees are still home, before they fly out in search of food.

Time to smoke them out. Frank says this will cause the bees to start eating the honey. Ideally, they will eat honey in preparation for flight instead of sting us.

Clearly, he is not just an investigator, but a surgeon as well.

Throw in a little creep factor...

Voila, we have our nest!

Frank says that you can tell that the hive is very old by the color. It is also not a well producing hive, because we did not find any honey. This hive was barely hanging on for life.

Look at our poor wall. about 3 inches of the bottom was just a pile of dead, black bees. Since they didn't have a way to escape like they do in the wild, they just dropped down to the sill and stacked high.

Collecting and piecing together the hive for a bee box. Hopefully the queen is in here somewhere.

Poor Jesse, he wanted to see too, but there was only one extra bee suit. Don't worry jesse, I'm burning up in this suit and will trade places soon!

More surgery is performed:

And here's the hard part. The bees that strayed are vacuumed up. You can guess their fate.

I had a hard time with this. We are removing these bees from the only home they have ever known. We. are. killing. bees. You are not supposed to kill bees. 

Frank assured us that these bees were doomed. There was no honey in the walls. The life cycle of these bees is very short. It's the queen that matters (remember that, men). The walls of a house aren't conducive to a thriving bee colony.

My job, besides taking pictures of the process, was to vacuum the bees as he pulled out the combs. At any given time, there would be 50 bees flying around the room. The sun was coming up and there was no time to waste. 

I wasn't afraid, because we spent our summer surrounded by bees in our garden. Hundreds of bees, and we were never stung. Now I was in a bee suit. No problem. It was so much fun.

Every experience in our lives prepares us for the next one, doesn't it?

Frank (or Mr. Frank, say the kids), pointed out a yellow jacket flying around in the nest. He says that when there is a yellow jacket in a bee hive, it's another sign of a failing hive. Yellow jackets feed off weak honey bees.

There were still many bees in our attic, so he generously let us borrow his shop vac so we could vacuum up remaining bees. We spent a few more hours vacuuming the bees until they were gone. The alternative was to call an exterminator to spray the house.

Eek! Spray chemicals in a house with precious children around?

The next step is to scrape down the walls and plug the holes so that another bee population doesn't smell the sweet walls and create another home.

We asked Mr. Frank if he could put a bee box on our farm. We can't have this hive, because they will naturally gravitate to the walls of the house again. 

You know what else? Knowing how much I love honey, he brought me two quarts of the stuff from his home.

Then he invited us to his house to return the vac. There he showed us a hive he has encased in glass in his home. He showed us that the queen lays up to 2000 eggs per day, and how she always faces down when she lays an egg. 

It's all so incredibly fascinating. 

At the end of the day, we asked him how much we owe him. Do you know what he said?

I do it because I love it. Because I want to be kind and generous. The best thing you can do for me is to continue in the spirit of kindness and generosity.

I am not sure I believe that things happen for a reason, because terrible things happen to wonderful people. What I do believe is that our experiences prepare us for things in our life and that people come into our lives for a reason. To teach us. Meeting Mr. Frank was just what we needed. Thank you, Mr. Frank, for giving us hope.