One night many years ago, Steve couldn’t sleep and got up to read in the living room. All was quiet in the house; except… what was that humming sound? The sound seemed to be coming from the floor. He put his ear on the floorboards and the humming grew louder. That’s how we first discovered that we had a hive of honey bees living under our floor. Our house is old, but this portion had been added on in the 1970s. They had left the old foundation wall in place and enclosed a crawl space with no access under the floor of the addition. The bees came in through a crawlspace vent and set up housekeeping there.
It took us a few years to get around to asking our friend and beekeeper Freddy to remove them. The bees didn’t bother us too much. The kids were not afraid of them. (I remember looking out my office window into our backyard one day and seeing Amelia at about age 5 or 6 practically engulfed in a bee swarm. She didn’t even flinch. Bees are very docile when they’re swarming. Still, it was a bit unnerving for mom.) Freddie succeeded in moving the bees into a bee box, which we then brought down our back hill to a field of squash that needed pollinating at the time. He boarded up the vent on one side of the crawlspace, and used a smaller mesh screen to prevent access on the other.
Bees, however, are resourceful and persistent. This April I started to notice several bees at a time crawling around the corner of the board that covers the vent on one side. They didn’t seem to be getting in, but I should have realized that they were slowly and methodically working at enlarging a crack that they had found. I could have sealed the crack as soon as I noticed the activity, but I didn’t really think about it until it was too late. It all became clear when a swarm of bees moved in on Easter weekend. The opening they had made was still small, and the bees clustered on the side of the house for hours before they all squeezed in to their new home.
We like bees. We love having them on the farm to pollinate the crops, and skittish friends know to come around to the back door if they are intimidated by the fuzzy sentries guarding the front. So, given how busy we are, it may be some time before we get around to evicting these new tenants.
Enjoy your honey this week if you ordered some. (See below for pick-up details.)
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