Home Sweeet Home

The Muir-N-Slager adventure officially concluded on April 24.  The RV traveling portion of our life over.  We pulled into our driveway around 3:00 in the afternoon, tired from a long drive, and delighted to see our home.  Our renter of these past 10 months graciously offered to move out a week before the lease was officially up, and we took him up on the offer.  Having a wonderful renter take care of our home was just one of the many blessings of the past year. 

I asked Dan for the honor of driving us into Charlotte partly because he had driven us out but also because I distinctly remember being dumbstruck and a little terrified on the way out of town.  The RV seemed so enormous.  It was hard to believe it was legal to drive it on city streets.  I wanted to experience what it would be like to drive us back into Charlotte.  The drive in was fun and a little giddy.  If the way out felt like watching Dan navigate a cruise ship down a creek, the way in felt almost as natural as driving my sedan to the grocery store.  Sure, we had about 10 inches of clearance on either side of the RV and the trees brushed our roof as we drove down Sharon Road, but it was laughably easy.  I felt like a qualified big rig driver.

We parked on the street to disconnect our tow car for the last time and Dan jumped in Moby to steer her up our very narrow, steep driveway. I walked up the drive ahead of Moby to help him navigate between some tight trees, but he didn’t need the help after 10 months of navigating tight spots.   We spent the balance of that first afternoon giving the house a good scrub – more a Corona precaution than housekeeping necessity – and reexploring our house.  We topped off a good day with the girl’s favorite takeout.

Turns out, the adventure wasn’t over…. our homecoming had surprise in store.

When we woke on Saturday morning and started to unload Moby, we noticed some bee activity under the eaves of our house outside of our bedroom.  Upon closer inspection we realized the bees were going into the house, slipping over gaps in the rock between the wall and the roof members.  This part of our house is over 100 years old and even though the interior has been gutted and modernized, there are nooks, crannies and other vestiges of age that beckon to our woodland neighbors.  Since we have lived here, nature has been our constant companion.  Deer graze in the woods behind the house, racoons invade the compost pile, foxes sun themselves on our driveway and frogs keep us up at night croaking away in the fountain outside our bedroom.  Hard to believe we are only several miles south of the city and a mile from Whole Foods!

We called Andrew, an amateur beekeeper friend of ours, to get his assessment.  He wasn’t optimistic about the situation.  As best any of us could tell, the bees were in the wall.  They definitely weren’t what he called a “snatch and grab” job – meaning, no exposed comb in the attic that a beekeeper could easily remove.  He said we had two options.  One, kill them ourselves, a recommendation he was loathe to make.  Apparently, bees are protected, and best control companies won’t touch them.  Two, call a contractor and professional beekeeper to take the wall down and remove the hive.  He also suggested we call a professional beekeeper for a second opinion.  We did and she confirmed Andrew’s assessment.

The first option went totally against every fiber in my body.  Bees are so important to the world.  Literally, unless you want to eat root vegetables for the rest of your natural life – you should worship at the alter of pollinating bees!  Dan wasn’t a fan of this option either – he had been contemplating starting our own hives once we settled back down – and killing a wild one seemed like an inauspicious start.  The second option wasn’t attractive either.  That sounded expensive, messy and time consuming.  So, we thanked Andrew for his opinion and spent the balance of the day contemplating two bad options.  Sometime that afternoon I offered up a third option that I knew was already percolating in Dan’s brain…we could always DIY bee removal.  How hard could that be?  We were fully qualified to remove and replace drywall, Andrew had beekeeping suits he might lend us and we wanted our own hive to boot!  This could be a win-win.  And that, friends, is how our adventures often start.

I am quite certain Andrew thought we were bat-shit crazy.  When I texted him the next morning to see if he would lend us his equipment his response started with “Ummmmmmmm.” But he kindly brought over an entire suite of beekeeping paraphernalia and offered to help us with the project – doubly kind because unlike Dan and me, Andrew has a day job! 

We read somewhere that the queen was probably laying over 1,000 bee eggs a day, so we decided to put all other projects aside and tackle this one first thing Tuesday morning.  We watched several You Tube videos on the subject (none of them seemed to involve DIY homeowners I might add) and hatched a plan for the morning.  Dan would create a “clean room” inside of our bedroom so the ensuing chaos would be confined to a controlled area.  I would make a homemade bee vacuum.  In all the videos we saw, the beekeepers used a very gentle vacuum to remove bees from the comb before detaching the comb from the house.  Using a standard vacuum would kill the bees – the suction would be too strong. The girls would be tasked with documenting the process and staying out of the way of angry insects.

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Tuesday morning dawned and we hit the day with much enthusiasm.  Dan had the room sectioned off quickly and I started converting our vacuum cleaner to a bee suctioning device.  We mapped out the section of drywall we guessed would have to come down, cut it out and removed it.  We suspected we wouldn’t see much at first, the bees were probably behind the insulation based on our You Tube research.  Our assumption was correct, we didn’t see the comb when we removed the wall, but we did hear a giant buzzing sound and several bees flew out.  We replaced the drywall section, called Andrew and suited up.  Andrew borrowed more gear from his neighbor and came over to guide us through the crazy.

What ensued was 3 hours of great fun!  I designated myself bee removal goddess and asked Dan and Andrew to be the vacuum crew (we later rotated bee duties; bee removal is exhausting).  I pulled the drywall section back down, took a deep breath, and pulled back the insulation.  The smell, feel and sounds of the beehive were just beautiful.  It smelled earthy and faintly sweet.  The closest I can compare it to is a Lebanese dessert they served at Epice, my favorite restaurant in Nashville.  The dessert was a dense cake of sorts infused with honey and rosewater.  The sound was alive, thousands of bees working at once, buzzing together.  You could feel the sound almost as much as you could hear it.  With the insulation pulled back I could see the comb descending from its attachment point on the roof truss.  The picture below doesn’t do it justice, the yellow comb was almost neon against the dark backdrop of the wall cavity.

Our mission was to vacuum as many bees out as possible, remove as much of the comb as possible, and relocate the entire thing to a small bee box – hoping the queen was amongst the captured.  The queen was key.  Leave her behind and Andrew said they would just come back.  Inadvertently kill her and the hive might not survive (although apparently the bees can produce an “emergency queen”– sounds a little like Nathan Lane’s character in The Birdcage). Capture her and, as in chess, you win!  Andrew looked hard at each piece of comb we removed but didn’t see her.  We carefully attached the salvaged comb to the frames in the box, hoping we either overlooked her or that she was in the mounds of bees we vacuumed up and relocated to the box.

The work was hot and exhausting.  Because the comb was attached in a relatively inaccessible place, it had to be manually tugged off the roof beam versus using a knife to make a clean cut allowing the pieces to come out intact.  Unfortunately, this approach tore the comb in some places.  We took those smaller pieces and laid them out near the bee box hoping it would lure the bees to the box.  Perhaps they could also use that comb as a source of energy to fuel new comb creation – bits of the comb were dripping with the most delicious honey (I know because I stole a taste!).

We finished the salvage operation tired, relatively uninjured (Dan got stung a few times) and tickled with our relative success.  Dan sealed up the crevice outside the house where the bees were entering, and we toasted the day’s hard work.  This morning we did a final bee vacuum, applied additional spray foam to the outside entrance (we aren’t 100% sure it is fully sealed off yet) and applied pesticide to the cavity to deter the bees from coming back.  The box is perched on some logs across the driveway from the house and as of this morning the bees seem to have taken up some level of residence. Keeping our fingers crossed that we have the queen and that enough of the bees survived the ordeal to re-hive.  Andrew is coming back out this weekend to assess our progress and help us plan next steps – thank goodness for resourceful friends.  Wish our bees good luck, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they survive in their new home?!