Why do they hate YOU?

“OW!”

Joshua got stung. Again. The bees had been removed, and there were just a few confused bees flying around the room, and one of them stopped circling and decided that she hated Joshua enough to commit suicide by butt.

I just stood there, amazed. “OK, you’ve seen what I did. Let’s get you out, so that it doesn’t happen again.”

Three days earlier, when I first showed up at Joshua and Stormy’s house, I got to check out the bees that were entering in through a gap in the siding. They were pretty docile, and they let me come right up and look at the crack, and not one of the girls bothered to pay attention to me. Joshua came over to see, and immediately got stung. And then got stung again. These otherwise docile bees HATED him.

He shook it off well. He is a big dude, and is not afraid of the sting. But getting stung hurts. (As it is supposed to).

When I say he is a big dude, this is an understatement. Guy truly makes me look small. Removing the hive from the basement, I ran across the biggest pair of Air Jordans I had ever seen in person. (And I had dated a girl in grad school whose brother was 6’10” and who wore a size 17 shoe.) “Size 18,” he shrugged when I asked him.

The removal was going to be an easy one; I had even looked at the infrared images to confirm. Two pieces of siding removed, a few pieces of comb, a little bit of vacuuming, and I would be out. And Stormy could return to a life in a bee-free house.

Of course, it is never as easy as that. I removed the siding. Bob may be your uncle, but there was no end to it there. The bees were going in, and then turning up to the wall of the upper bedroom. Or maybe turning down into the basement. Not really clear.

I went downstairs, and sure enough, there was a nice heat spot right behind the wall. Easy enough, but I was worried. I had been wrong before. Woke the sleeping baby to take an infrared gander at the wall behind the bed, and there was no heat signature there. So removal could take place in the basement. All good.

All was not good. I cut a small hole in the sheetrock downstairs, and zero bees flew out to attack me. Zero bees decided to check out the basement. Absolutely no bees greeted me at all. I could not even hear any buzzing.

Now I am a little frantic. I waited until late in the day so I would only take a couple of hours off from work to do this. And I haven’t even opened the wall yet. So I go back upstairs, and I re-scan the area behind the bed. Turns out, that the carpet area has a nice highlighted infrared spot. The bees had found a place between the downstairs ceiling and the upstairs floorboard. Tearing out floorboards in bedroom is a greater impact than cutting a hole in the ceiling. So I did that. The bees had been there a little longer than I had thought; the queen was already on her second round of laying in the comb, which meant that the bees had been in place for at least a month – a week to build enough comb to lay eggs in, and then 21 days from egg to emerged bee.

I removed the comb, made a mess of the floor, and bee-vac-ed the place until it was very nearly bee-free. Standard practice. Bee-vac-ed the outside, too. Then invited Joshua to come and look. Two stings later, we stepped back outside.

And then it dawned on me. There is a reason why bee suits are white.

“Dude,” I said. “I got it. I know why the bees are stinging you. I mean, LOOK at you. You are 6’5″, 340 or so, right?” He nodded. “And you are wearing dark pants and a dark shirt. What do you think the bees see?”

He frowned.

“THEY SEE A BEAR! That is why the suits are white, and why the bees are attacking you on sight.”

“Maybe a brown bear,” he agreed. He shrugged out of his navy blue shirt, leaving on the white t-shirt he had on underneath. Sure enough, a bee came over to him, and flew off, uninterested.

Some days, the bears eat the honey. I left him some comb to enjoy.