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The Bees and the Tree sounds like it could be the title of a children’s book.  However,  it’s just another entry in the growing list of mini-dramas since moving to the new house last year. It all started way back in aught-nine…

When we bought the house, there was a large, dead tree in the back. Some say it was upwards of 20 feet tall, some say well over 90 feet. We’ll never know for sure, but it was tall.  It didn’t have any limbs. It was just a twisted, thick trunk with bark slowly peeling off the sides.  It was thick enough that 5 very small men holding hands couldn’t reach around it.  Maybe.  I’ve never had 5 very small men holding hands in my backyard, so I can’t be sure.

It sat in the back corner of the yard, down in the swampy section near the fence line. It never really caused us much of a problem, except that eventually, we knew we wanted to put something over there better than a large, dead tree. A shed, perhaps?

We called our tree guy. I didn’t know we had a tree guy and I don’t know how we acquired a tree guy, but we have one and his name is Eduardo. So we called Eduardo to take a look at chopping down our large, dead tree. Eduardo surveyed the situation and reported back that we had a fine family of possum living in this large, dead tree. Being animal lovers, and not wanting the possums to move into the basement of the house and die a horrible, stinky death like a raccoon family had recently done, we opted to let them be for a while.

Fast forward to the present (or close enough). Time to cut the tree down. I was getting really serious about maybe starting on a plan to think about designing a potential shed-like object. And I couldn’t visualize with that large, dead tree sitting there, mocking me. Back on the phone with our tree guy. He comes back and won’t get within 10ft of the tree. “Hay Bees”, he says in terrified spanglish (Translation:  There’s Bees!). Lots of bees. And Eduardo really doesn’t like bees.

Time to call in our bee people.

OK, we don’t have bee people, or at least we didn’t;  I suppose we do now, though I hope we don’t need to talk to them again for quite some time.  The bee guy came but there was a complication from what I guess could be considered normal bee removals.  We wanted both the bees and the tree gone.  This would require some strong coordination.  It’s lucky that I had my best bilingual PMP®-certified project manager on the ground and directing the action (or at least taking photographs of the entire circus!)

It took a few hours, a lot of running around with arms waving  (by the tree guy and his crew), smoke (to quiet the bees down), chainsaws, hoses, leafblowers(!), ladders, costume changes (tree guy put on bee guy suit – bee guy did not put on tree guy clothes, however).

Once the tree was actually cut and opened, we got to see the whole enchilada inside.  According to the experienced eye of the bee guy,  we were looking at about 3 sections of 3ft honeycombs and many thousands of honey bees.

After all was said and done, for the low, low cost of a few hundred dollars, we got exactly 1 less tree and 1 small jar of smoke-flavored honey (our bee guy only uses the best hickory smoke, of course).

The few hours of entertainment and yet another story to tell about our house were, of course, priceless.

Tags: animals, backyard, DIY, homeowner

This entry was posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Joys of the Homeowner.