Pet Bees

Last Monday, around three in the afternoon, Sylvianne Tauran-Rogers our friend and realtor, was here translating for me in my breakup with Monsieur Reste. He's the former owner of the property who is leaving . . . and not on good terms. But that's another post, heck it's an entire book in itself.

We were standing on the east side of the house when we heard an abnormally loud buzzing sound. When we went around to the north side of the house, we were horrified to see thousands, and thousands, and I mean thousands, of bees swarming the shutters of the upstairs window of Preston's bedroom. Preston came out to inform us that the bees had arrived moments ago and were filling up the space between his window and the closed shutters.

When Sylvianne and I went upstairs to look, it was a scene from a horror movie . . . thousands of buzzing bees forming a huge pulsating mound.

Leo, the man putting in the fence for the sheep, arrived and attempted to open the shutters from the inside of the house. He accomplished getting the latch open, but he couldn't throw the shutters out because bees were invading the bedroom through the small opening he had made with the window.

Mr. Reste gave Preston the name of two men who make money on the side by getting rid of bees. I called one but he wasn't home and his wife said she'd have him call me when he returned. I called my friend Norman who keeps bees, but there was no answer. And then I remembered that he was in England researching his family tree.

I was having ten people over for aperitifs and so I was a bit frazzled by the fact that a giant swarm of bees had taken over the house and I still needed to bake some Gougeres.

The guests arrived and I took all of them upstairs to Preston's room to see the amazing bees that I was now calling Preston's "Pet Bees." Everyone said that the sight was incroyable. One of my guests, Francoise Dupont, keeps bees . . . a fact that I had forgotten, and she volunteered to come in the morning and take them away. We called the man I had called previously and told him that the bees had left. I guess that a new hive of bees is valuable and my guests thought that I shouldn't insult him by telling him the truth, that I was letting Francoise take the bees. In my American capitalist view, I didn't think that we should worry about his feelings since he hadn't even bothered to call me back when I had told his wife it was an emergency so his lack of customer service had rightfully lost him the job.

Amazingly, Preston slept through the night with this mound of thousands of bees not more than five feet away from his bed. Thankfully, bees sleep at night and don't snore so Preston slept soundly. I slept with the door of my bedroom tightly shut.

In the morning, Francoise and her husband Herve arrived with their white bee suits, ladders, a large plastic garbage can, a dustpan, a bed sheet, and a bee smoker. They trudged up to Preston's room, ladders banging the walls as they squeezed up the narrow, newly painted, staircase. Preston was grumpy that we got him out of bed at nine in the morning. Francoise and Herve lit the smoker (now the house smells like smoked meat) and that made the bees high, allowing Francoise to take the dustpan and scrape the top of the giant mound off of the window, dropping the mass of bees into the large garbage can. She swiftly threw the sheet over the can and carried the bees down the stairs and out to her van. By the time she put the garbage can in her van, the bees were sober again and buzzing wildly.

Francoise didn't get all the bees and said that she thought these others, lacking the leadership of their queen, would leave before nightfall. Francoise said that she would return the next morning and check to see if there were any more bees.

Well, the bees that were left behind were the really stupid bees because they decided to build another small mound despite the fact that they didn't have a queen bee. Or perhaps they were really smart bees and decided to defy millions of years of natural instinct, and to hell with it, queen or no queen, they were going to build a colony. So even with the shutters opened, exposed to the elements, about five hundred bees joined together to form a new mound on Preston's window.

When Francoise arrived the next morning, Tuesday, she sprayed the bees with insect spray and that took care of the problem. The brave new bees were slaughtered as they attempted to strike out on their own and create a new form of bee government.

Four days later, on Sunday morning, I went to take two strawberry tarts to my friends Pierre-Yves and Marylen who were leaving the next day to return to Paris for medical procedures. P-Y and Marylen live near Francoise Dupont's beehives. Marylen told me that she was out in her garden on Saturday, and heard a loud droning sound that sounded like an airplane. She looked up and saw a huge swarm of bees, "thousands of them," she emphasized, "and they were heading towards the hill above your place." We laughed together, thinking how preposterous that would be . . . the newly relocated hive determined to escape en masse and fly back to my house.

Last night (Monday) I was in the kitchen, washing out a paint brush, I had been touching up the stairwell, and I heard the muted, yet unmistakable sound of a multitude of buzzing bees. The humming was coming from an old stove pipe that peeks out of the wall near the ceiling. The previous owners had wadded up a piece of material and shoved it in the opening. I hadn't bothered to remove it because I learned early on in this house that unless you're prepared to sink thousands of dollars into a repair project, don't remove anything . . . I mistakenly picked up a dirty mat that was in front of the sink the first day we moved in and found a big hole in the wooden floor. Thank God I'm not obsessive about cleaning, because that wadded up piece of dirty rag was saving me from a swarm of bees invading my kitchen.

I'm having a cup of tea now, waiting for Francoise to arrive. I don't think that the removal of the bees will be as easy as it was before.

Back in 1993 or 94', before we were married, Craig purchased a lovely painting of a man who has a beehive for a head. Appropriately, it's entitled, "Beehive Man." I thought the painting was surrealist . . . little did I know that it was depicting my future reality.