🐝Evacuating 25,000 Honey Bees Out My House🐝

After they entered the kitchen, they had to go

Photo by City Church Christchurch on Unsplash

There have always been birds and bees in my house. Since I was little, they lived in the corner of the third floor, entering into a chewed out hole in the soffit where it meets the brick on the corner facing the morning sun. It’s also the corner closet to the back door and the kitchen.

This is important.

The bees never bothered me much growing up. We knew they were there, high up, doing their thing. They never came down. Never swooped around. Then one year they were gone, replaced by angry hornets that would attack every time we went to the back door.

Those hornets were eventually killed. Not evacuated, but sprayed to death in my teens. I don’t recall who my father had to go up there and get them. But the hornets had gotten into the attic so enough was enough.

The corner went dormant for a while. Then the squirrels moved in. We evicted only for them to be replaced by several raccoons who often had drag out midnight fights with ‘possums. I live in Chicago, and my neighborhood is super close to Indiana, so I called Bob the Varmint Trapper in the Hoosier State and he did a stake out, and got them. Commented on how fluffy and full they were. Claimed to re-home them. I hope he did. The foxes moved into the yard a few winters ago, probably to eat the rabbits in the shrubs. Coyotes too. As for this year, we used to have a bunch of squirrels until I started seeing this eagle (and yes Karen, I’m a lifelong Girl Scout and know what an eagle is. It was an eagle, not a buzzard. Eagles often frequent the rivers that ring the Chi and flow into the Mississippi, and I live near several such rivers.) Anyhoo. I digress.

The honeybees moved back in to the soffit.

A year or so after that I noticed a handful of dead bees in front of the door one morning. I swept them up. Tossed them out. The next day there were 20 dead bees.

I figured they were dying of whatever mysterious disease was killing the honeybees around the world. Yet… and yet… the bees were still flying in and out of that top corner. You could hear them buzzing — late at night when no cars were roaring by — from inside my son’s bedroom if you put your…