Unauthorized use of s-vac

So it's been pretty busy month around here as I run around in an attempt to close up projects so I can feel good about leaving again for a while. A few weeks ago I am working in the yard and I hear the most amazing and indescribable noise that I can only describe as 20 weed whackers going at once. It was right over my head. Someone decided it was a great day to move and my house was picked as being pretty cool. I could only watch as a HUGE swarm of bees slowly disappeared through a little crack in my eve and into the attic somewhere.

Egads... something else to deal with. Add it to the list! [sigh]

For the next couple of days I watched as a few bees would come/go but it showed no signs of what actually went in there. If I hadn't been a direct witness I would never have believed it and might not have even noticed them. When called, exterminators said the bees might actually just be using it as a rest stop and they won't send anybody out for about a week. There was a bit of hope when we had a real cold couple of nights and I hardly saw anything for a while. Upon the next warm day they were quite active again tho.

I decided it was time to deal with it, but I needed to reduce the numbers a bit. So I set up a bee-sucker. I had a 10ft section of 4 in plastic pipe that I propped up with a ladder towards the opening they were using and duct taped the hose of my shop-vac to the lower end. That worked very well. Once the little guys wandered over to see what this big new thing was, there was no going back. An unplanned bonus was the tumbling down the pipe and hose broke up the little guys into bits so I didn't have a 6 gallon drum of really angry buzzers in the end. After a couple of days of this (random running) I had about 100 in the catcher. I picked another cold evening to go hunt for the rest of them. I got lucky that they had not ventured into unreachable depths of the attic, and only had to pull down a couple of boards until I found them.

I had my sucker hose ready in case I pissed them off, but they actually were quite docile. They had been busy. There were about six layers double sided, many all filled up with honey and some even capped off. I watched them crawling around for quite a while and I momentarily thought of some sort of capture/recovery, but decided I had no way of knowing if they were violent (Africanized) or not. If I wanted to try the sticky business, now would not be the time to do it.

In an attempt to suck up a few more before I decide what the next move would be, I stuck in the end of the shopvac hose. I kept getting closer, and found out those little guys can sure hold on. Then my nozzle stuck to the first layer of comb which tore off and plugged up my only line of defense. In a brief personal moment I thought "this is gonna hurt" and as I fought off the urge to scream like a little girl and run, the bees surprised me and stayed clinging onto the comb as the chunk slowly sucked into the end, turned and fully disappeared with a big "floomp". It was then that I was glad I bought the 6.5 hp shopvac instead of a lesser model. With new warrior confidence the rest of the combs went like the first and the whole process was almost as much as a non-event as I could have hoped. I never did spot the queen, but I'm pretty sure I got everybody.

I'm kinda bummed about killing the whole colony, but wild bees are quite a problem in the area and they don't really belong in the city. Besides, they had no bizz-ness hanging out in my attic.

I can now add bee-executioner to my long list of talents.
-B