Bees In Our Bonnets

After a hard day at work, I drove home with only two things on my mind: returning my mother’s call about our tax return and preparing lesson plans for tomorrow. I practiced unsafe driving by calling my mother on the way home from work. I’m happy to report that we’re getting a refund this year! Yay! Now I can take that trip on spring break without worrying about too much (more on that in a bit).

After we wrapped up our conversation, I pulled into the driveway and began unloading my crap from the truck.
Uncharacteristically, Dan met me outside the house, looking slightly panicked. I wasn’t even inside the house when he told me that there were several bees inside the house and that there was a swarm in our backyard. I stood there for a moment, rooted to the spot. After that news I didn’t even want to go into the house. Why would I want to go in where there were bees?!

Dan told me he had them trapped in the master bathroom, so I went into the house. The most unfortunate part of this whole scenario is that Dan is very allergic to bee stings. He was rightly nervous about this whole turn of events. We went into the house and headed towards the master bedroom. Once inside the bedroom I could see that there was a bee in our closet now, too. We swiftly left the bedroom and headed out into the family room to see what was going on outside.

Upon peeking out the back door window, I could see about 15 - 20 bees flying around our master bathroom door. Our master bathroom leads directly out into the backyard. I called my mom, who told me my options were to go buy bee killer spray, spray them and run or; leave them alone and wait for them to go away.

After going on the internet, I learned that bumble bees usually don’t attack you unless you attack them first. Suddenly I was struck with a mental vision of me running wildly away from a swarm of bees, screaming my head off and trying to get inside. Since I was pretty sure I couldn’t outrun a bee, I decided to check on the bees in the backyard. Luckily, it seemed like they were down to about three or four remaining bees.

While Dan watched from inside, I walked around the house into the backyard (you know, to sneak up on the bees), and opened the bathroom door to let the trapped bees out. The entire time I walked towards the bathroom door I was chanting: Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me. Thankfully, they listened and I high tailed it back into the house.

Of course, now we realized that we had opened up the door (which we had to do to let the trapped bees out) but what was to prevent more bees from going inside the bathroom. Genius. I suited up in bee proof clothing, which involved a hoodie sweatshirt - with the hood part up around my head and tied closed enough to only allow my eyes and my nose out.

I’ll wait while you laugh at that image.

Done? Good, so I opened the bathroom door and was thrilled to discover the room bee free. (As I type this, I hope they didn’t go into the vents and are even now plotting to come out when I’m taking a shower.) I quickly shut the bathroom door and closed the dog door, thus ending the Amazing Bee Adventure.

I had planned to talk about my spring break trip, but I’ve rambled on long enough for today. I’ll leave that for another day. Oh, and no, I don’t have ANY idea why these bees showed up. Nothing has changed, to my knowledge, from yesterday to today. Weird.