Forget The Farmer's Almanac -- Ask The Yellowjackets

     Jagger tried to eat a dead bee that he found on the morning room floor the other day.  I was able to fish it out of his mouth before he could swallow (I know, big ick factor) but didn't even think twice about how a bee got into our house.  A couple of days later, our nanny said she had smooshed about four bees in the room, and she believed they were coming in through the wall.  I pooh-poohed this notion.  We had never had bees in the house before, and I didn't know how they could possibly have gotten in through the walls. 

     The next day, I got home from work and she said that there was a beehive hanging off the frame of one of the windows of our basement.  (For you Californians, basements are not merely the basements that you hear about on TV -- scary storage spaces where boogeymen hang out.  Basements on the East Coast are part of the living space of your house).  Again, I dismissed this. 

     The following morning I thought to mention it to Randy so he could look at it.  He came in talking about needing to call an exterminator.  I thought he meant "at some point in our lives."  But as soon as I got to work Randy called to say an exterminator was on his way to our house and Randy was leaving work to meet the man.  When the exterminator arrived, Randy wasn't home yet, so I had the pleasure of talking to the exterminator by phone.  Evidently our house was the scene of an attack of the Yellowjackets.  They had made a humongous bee hive at the window, and they had infiltrated our house -- they had built hives inside the walls and were coming into the house through the vents.  Just in the few hours that I had been at work, the nanny had captured nearly a dozen from just one room.

     Apparently, the number of bees in the summer is directly correlated to the inches of snow in the winter.  The exterminator said that last summer he was extremely busy attending to bee calls.  This summer it was even worse.  The last call he got was for the same problem as ours -- bees in the walls.  In that house, he forced "safe" chemicals into the walls to kill the bees.  The bees tried to escape, and THOUSANDS of them came out of the vents and into the house.  It sounded like a horror movie.

     At our house, the exterminator duct taped plastic trash bags over the vents on the floors to catch any bees that escaped.  He then put on his bee suit (I haven't forgiven Randy yet for not taking a picture for my blog of the exterminator in his bee suit), took down the hive outside, and sprayed the "safe" chemicals into our walls.  (Check with me in 20 years -- if I'm alive and don't have an extra arm, that will be the proof that he was right about the chemicals being safe).  The exterminator said that there would be a lot of bees coming out over the next couple of days.  If it got bad, we were instructed to call him for a second shot of the chemicals.  Fortunately, thousands of bees did not come ito the house through the vents.  It was more like around one hundred, not all at once and not all through the bagged vents.  The bees kept coming for a few days afterwards. One day, Jagger tried to eat one again.  (Yes, Mama, we are feeding Jagger enough.  He just likes to put things in his mouth.)  Unfortunately for Jagger this one was not dead, and it stung his lip on the way to his tongue.  Jagger's lip swelled up to about five times its normal size, and he screamed bloody murder.  But he was okay, and Benadryl brought his lip back down to its usual sweet shape. 

     Our lives have not turned into a horror movie about bees.  But according to the exterminator, it will be a very scary-cold winter.