Freebees are not always easybees

"Is this Jim Anderson, the bee-keeper?" asked the woman.

Without waiting for the answer, she blurted out, "I have bees in my rental home. Will you come and get them?"

Freebees are freebees, I thought, so why not. I told her I was the person she was looking for. As she explained her problem, where the house is and what was going on, familiar bells began ringing. Ah, I said to myself. I know this place...

Two years ago, the people who live next door to the bee house called me, asking if I could remove the bees from the house next door. Turns out, the bee's entrance adjoined their back yard, so the occupants of both homes were affected. When I called the women who owned the place, however, I got some guy who sounded like he couldn't care less, so I dropped it.

"The house is empty now," my caller said, adding, "and I have new tenants moving in on the first; can you come do it now?"

The bees were in the walls of a tiny bedroom, with the windows painted shut by at least 10 coats of paint. All except one.

I scoped out the space where I thought the bees were living and decided they were between a stud and the corner wall. Turned out that wasn't the only place they were living...

To be sure I was going to conduct this surgery in the right place I took my handy-dandy jiggle saw and cut an inspection hole in what turned out to be 1x18-inch ship-lap pine. I could smell the pine and honey on the blade, as the saw jiggled its way through the plank, and when the piece popped out, several hundred bees followed it.

I hit right smack-dab in the middle of the beehive.

I had anticipated a bunch of angry bees at my first attempt; I had stoked up my Uncle Harry's trusty 80-year-old smoker and was prepared for the onslaught of angry bees. As they streamed right at my face inside my bee veil (another precautionary move) I smoked 'em good.

Having ascertained the exact location of the colony, I fired up my Skill saw and proceeded to cut out the entire wall between the studs- floor to ceiling.

What a rodeo! Thousands of bees filled the tiny bedroom, all madder than a hornet. Some flew out the open window in a murderous rage and came right back in through the entrance hole, while others settled on my bee veil and to my discomfort, went under my gloves to sting me on the hands.

One brave worker found her way into my bee veil, got behind my glasses and gave me a good blast, so my left eye swelled up. Let me say right here: it was not the bee's fault that they were so upset, nor was it their fault that I got stung. I accept all responsibility!

Once I got the queen and several thousand of her workers in a hive, it took me several days to remove the rest of the bees because of the construction anomalies in the house. There were little crooks and crannies in the wall construction unknown to me, but the bees knew them all.

It took several trips to Bend to finalize the job, and now I have a huge colony of freebees to work with, a colony that will hopefully give me a good yield of honey at the end of summer. But the most embarrassing thing about this event is how little time it took Nyle Head to repair my destruction derby. What took me three days to destroy, took him two hours to repair.