Our Bee Problem

What's all that stuff in the tree. It's a bird! It's a plane! Nope, it's a whole bunch of bees!

I went to the lot to bring Molly in the house and there were tons of bee flying around. We have know for some time that we have bees living in the eves of the house, but now that it's getting warmer, it seems to be a much bigger problem than we realized. We went in the house for a few minutes and called an exterminator. When we went back out it was very strange. There were hardly any bees. We went around to the corner of the house, and then I saw them! They had landed...probably to take a little break, and so we ran in to get the camera. 1st thing everyone thinks of when there are thousands of little stinging insects near their house right?

Peter got the best pictures. The above is really from zoom. I was about to go inside and get the phone ready to call 911 if he got any closer. When we were putting up the lights at Christmas time, he told me he was allergic to bee stings when he was a kid, but not any more. He got stung a couple of times putting up the lights, and I had the phone ready, but never had to call 911. They were a problem then, but this was so much worse, so if he got them to come after him, we would have really been in trouble. My dad told me later that they were swarming around the queen and they can be really unpredictable like this. They could have turned on us at any time. I'm glad we went back in the house when we did. We may have stayed out a little longer, but I was getting paranoid about them all flying around. My mistake was telling Peter that. When I finally got the camera to take some pictures, he stuck his finger in my hair pretending to be a bee. Hahahaha, very funny. I don't think I screamed, but I'm sure I swatted, and that was it for me.

This is their hub, and the place that was a problem putting up the lights, as you may well imagine. The problem is they are not only in this one spot any more. They are spreading out, and we can see them coming in and out on each side of this too now.

The strangest thing of all is that when we left a couple hours later, they were gone. There wasn't a single bee on that tree, and they were flying around a bit more, but not nearly as much as before. Now we think they may have killed the queen. I guess they can do that when they all swarm around her.