In case you missed it, here are The Bees: Part 1 and Part 2.
Our house had been invaded by bees. We had sealed their entry point, but had to deal with the fact that there were over a hundred bees in our house at this point.
Luckily it was a very sunny day and that was drawing the bees to the windows. We brought the vacuum first to the living room with the huge window. We sucked up all that we could. Next to the sunroom. Suck. Suck. Suck. Systematically, we worked our way through the house sucking up bees as we went.
I started to worry when we hadn't gotten them all and it started to get darker outside. As the sun went down, the bees started flying around the house more since the windows were no longer guiding them to the light. But we kept at it until we thought that we had sucked up almost all of them.
Now to tackle the hive. Mr. Research had read that the best time to try to rid your house of bees is very late at night. The bees will all be sleeping, so you're less likely to get a fight out of them... at least at the beginning. Mr. Research had also learned what to use to get rid of the bees, so he needed to head to The Home Depot to pick up bee killer. After picking up the poison, we had several hours to kill before beginning our assault, so we headed to a friends' house and hung out and waited.
Finally, at midnight, we headed back home, rose duster and poison at the ready. Hubby rigged up the rose duster, stuck a tube on the end of it, and put a nozzle on the end of the tube so it would fit into the hole in our ceiling. He climbed up toward the ceiling, peeled the tape back, and stuck the tube in. Research was apparently correct, because when he peeled the tape back, none of our little friends was waiting to come through. They were all sleeping soundly. Then he began pumping the pesticide into the wall. Well, that woke them up. The scratching noise returned as every bee in the hive started crawling around. He must have pumped five pounds of that stuff into the wall before sealing the hole back up.
Mission accomplished. It was very hard for me to sleep that night. I was sure that there were still bees in the house. Bees that we had missed because we hadn't gotten them all before the sun went down. And I knew that if there were still bees in the house, they would definitely be waking up before I would. I kept having visions of angry bees waking up in the morning and realizing that I had killed all their buddies and seeing me still sleeping in my bed and attacking me. Thankfully, that didn't happen. (Obviously.)
A few weeks later Hubby got a ladder and cut a hole in the ceiling to clean out the carnage. I wish I'd taken a picture. The size of the bee's nest was enormous. In the end, I decided to be thankful for a lot of things that went right with our little adventure. Super-prepared husband. That Saturday was supposed to have been a day where 20 people were over at our house. Worse yet, they could have bored through that drywall on a day when I was at work and had all day to spill into the house. And I can't even imagine what I would have done had they come through while my husband was out of town. Actually, I take that back. I would have closed the door, locked it, and checked into a hotel. I just don't do bees.
