For months now I have tried to find someone who would like to coax away the colony of bees humming away in my walls. No make that, within my walls lately, as more and more of them find their way into the house, where they go into a frenzy. Dutifully, I have been removing them as gently as I could, shooing them outside, either with paper in hand, or, when they kept hurling themselves at the upper edges of the window, with a glass in which I would trap them. But I don’t always catch them alive. There is is always the carnage by the windows, the bodies of the ones who had no one to help them get back to the business of tending to the bottle brush flowers of the hedge so close to our walls and windows.
After almost 2 years of this, it finally happened: I got stung yesterday. Seems that I stepped on a dazed bee, which then, as bees in danger will do, released its stinger. The pain had me sprinting across the kitchen, straight to the fridge, where I got some ice. It seems that with the ice cube, I rubbed away the whole stinging apparatus, which contains the belly of the bee as well, pulsing and releasing its venom, apparently long after it has been torn away from the bee.
So now I feel an urgency to do something about these bees, even if it turns out that I’ll have to take some drastic measures. Since not one of the “natural” solution people for whom I left endless messages have called me back, looks like a job for an exterminator.
I see the bees congregating (that’s not the right word, I am sure), by the heating vent up on the roof, which is probably their entry point. Today, I took some time with my ears to the walls, and after some searching, there it was, the unmistakable hive buzz. I am not afraid of bugs of any sort, but that sound, after that sting yesterday, put me in a combative mood. These were not Rilke's bees gathering the honey of the invisible. Nope, these were the bees, visibly undermining the walls of my house, threatening to make them invisible....
The gloves are off, which may not be the smartest figure of speech, given my adversary here, and I am determined to evict the whole swarm of them. Who knows how deep the honeycombs go into the walls, and who knows how much it will cost to remove this huge “illegal” second multi-unit, sweet as it may be, but bee-gone it has to be, if peace be. Especially since I also found out that one of my neighbors is deadly allergic to bee stings….
I wish I could have watched some pastoral scene in which a bee whisperer comes and lures them away to a pollen paradise. I wish I could coexist with them in such close quarters. But these wishes are now just bees in my head, a noisy buzz that is losing its sting.
