Bees!

So we had bees coming in the house for weeks, flying to the windows and then dying. Sometimes I would clean up 10-15 bees a day, on top of the 4-5 that I would find alive and kill. As it gradually got worse we realized that there was a hive in our attic, so we called in a beekeeper to come take it out. Amazingly enough, no one had gotten stung up to this point. My worst fear was that Christina would pick one up and put it in her mouth!

The night before the guy comes to remove them, Katie comes from her room crying that her foot hurts. I asked her what happened and she said she stepped on the floor and then her foot tickled and then it hurt! Sure enough, she had stepped on a bee and gotten the stinger in her foot. Luckily it had gone in sideways and didn't go deep enough to penetrate under her skin.

So the next day I got a call from the nurse at Dillon's school saying that he had taken his shoes off on the playground and then stepped on a bee. Too bad this time it went deep and had already started swelling. She asked me to pick up some benadryl and bring it to school right away. So here I am, 9 months pregnant with 1, 2 and 4 year old girls, dragging them into the school. And now I have a 50 pound little boy who can't walk on one foot! Luckily the nurse realized my predicament and carried him out to the car for me. What irony that we've been living with bees for 6 weeks and no one got stung until now!

So, the bee guy comes. His original plan was to go through the ceiling in the living room and remove the hive with the bees alive. They spent 2 1/2 hours going in the attic, figuring out where they were, putting up plastic so they didn't fly all through the house, smoking the bees from the attic and then cutting a hole in the ceiling. But they got in there and couldn't find the hive!

Next they realize that the bees are in the eaves instead. They go outside and cut into the stucco and kill the bees so they can get the honeycomb out. By the time all is said and done, it is 11:30 at night, we have a hole in the girls' closet ceiling, one in my living room ceiling, one in the outside stucco and the house is a wreck. But the bees are gone!