To "bee" or not to "bee"

Talk about your party crashers. As the Mosiman family lounged around the camp fire, awaiting the arrival of their 4th of July guests, Sydney squinted up into the overhead branches and uttered the words that EVERY party hostess longs to hear:  "Is that a swarm of bees?"  "As they are not actually airborne, I believe the more accurate term is cluster," her father calmly corrected her while I ran screaming around the yard, ripping my hair out.

This has actually been an on-going problem, three or more years in the making. An impressive hive of bees had taken up residency in a nearby tree and no amount of coaxing, caulking, or cementing was going to convince them to move. We Mosimans pride ourselves on our neighborliness...having been known to treat fellow Hardys Road inhabitants with runny fudge, half-cooked chicken dinners and occasionally, chocolate raspberry pie. We approached our new bee friends with caution, adopting a "live-and-let-live" policy that worked well until our little dachshund suffered a sting on her paw and Brad began to view lawn mowing as a stunt sport.

The hunt for a bee whisperer was on but our phone calls, emails, and sky-writing messages went unanswered. We realize that killing a honey bee is the second greatest sin after kicking a kitten but we were getting desperate. After having someone remove bees from her walls, my friend Sue shared her bee guy's number and we got the answer we were looking for even though it was NOT the answer that we wanted. Apparently, just like my intention to regularly exercise, it is next to IMPOSSIBLE to remove an established hive from the depths of a tree. "Is it an established hive," the bee guy asked me. "Well, they put out a welcome mat, have an engraved door-knocker and host a weekly bible study," I told him, "Is that considered established?" I heard the sigh on the other end of the phone and then, in a lowered voice, the bee whisperer whispered to me. "You may have to take more euphemistic measures," he said softly. I gasped, "You don't mean...?" but the line had gone dead.

So with heavy hearts, we began the sad process of evicting our neighbors. Each morning, Brad would climb the ladder and bend over the humming hive buried in the tree to dump a bucket of warm soapy water over it. A cloud of bees would rise like confetti around my husband. I swear they were sporting shower caps and clutching little loofas. Day after day this would occur, leading up to our Independence Day party set for 7 pm. Nearly thirty people invited. No one showed up...except the bees.

Two hours later, as our (human) guests finally began to trickle in, I quickly served up hot dogs, pasta salad, watermelon, chips and yes, the chocolate raspberry pie...trying to hurry things along to move us out to the open field for the evening's culminating event. But people were content to rest and relax by the fire, not realizing that death loomed overhead. "It's like The Hunger Games out there," Savannah whispered, as the branch swung alarmingly under the weight of the bees. We eventually told our guests about our unconventional party pinata and our friend Than shared that he, too, had a guy. Yeah...whatever.

Except he did. Have a guy. Unfortunately, that meant that Than would call me at 6:45 the following morning to bring his bee guy over. The bee guy climbed a ladder. The bee guy cut the bee-covered branch. The bee guy held the bee-covered branch over a box. The bee guy banged the bee-covered branch over the box. The bees then bounced into the box. "There's about two or three pounds of bees here," remarked the bee guy. How much does a bee weigh," whispered Sydney. "One tenth of a gram," I whispered back, because I know stuff like that without having to Google it. Google is making us stupid. "How many grams are in a pound," she wondered. "454," I answered. I shook my head. What are the schools teaching kids these days? "These sure are clean bees," we'll pretend my bee guy said.

According to my calculations (and NOT a Google search), three pounds yields approximately 3500 bees. Holy honey bee, Batman! How many bees must STILL be in my tree?

In case you were wondering about last week's bee bible study topic, it was from Psalm 118:

They surrounded Brad Mosiman like bees; They were extinguished with soapy water as a fire of thorns; In the name of the LORD I will surely cut them off.

I hope this isn't a prophetic warning about my tree. Sigh. Something's got to go.