Our Bees

Our Bees
Originally uploaded by S Hall.

This looks like a beehive, but it is literally a solid ball of bees that nested in one of our trees! Mary's science teacher used to raise bees. His guess is that this queen bee lost her beehive to another queen bee so this "tribe" is hanging out in our tree until they can find a new place to build their hive!

While Stan was busy teaching, three of our neighbors got together and decided to get rid of the bees. (This was Friday and we were having people over for Landon's birthday party on Saturday.) They lit combustible material in a metal wheelbarrow with gasoline. We watched as the bees were stunned by the smoke and then dropped one by one into the fire in the wheelbarrow. The next morning there seem to be 2 or 3 thousand bee bodies in the wheelbarrow!

We were sorry the bees had to die, but we were glad they were gone. Stan was also sad that he missed the action!