Incoherent Mutterings

I came home yesterday and went out back to water my yard a little. As I was talking with TR and @aelerelean, I mentioned the bee swarm on the back fence.  They’d been there over two weeks by this point. I said “oh, they’re not aggressive because they haven’t found a home. There’s nothing to protect.” @aelerelean went to check them out. Yeah. They have indeed established a colony. On my fence. The part of the fence that gets full sun all day long. “oh no” the internet said “they’ll stay 4 days at most. They like spaces that can be protected and temperature controlled!” How very, very wrong the internetwebtubes were. This is a spot just under the pitiful shade of a vine (seriously, the leaves are maybe 2 inches long), on a chain link fence, completely unprotected. No nooks. No crannies. The reason why this vine flourishes in the summer is because it likes…DIRECT GODDAMN SUN. So how is this beneficial to bees?  I know not. @aelerelean believes that these are lazy bees. When they swarmed, the vine had blooms. Easy food source? Perhaps. The blooms are gone.  Seriously, I thought bees were smarter than this. Hell, I should have been smarter than this to believe a homeless swarm would just chill for over two weeks.

For comparison:

Here’s the swarm on the 15th: [nggtags gallery=swarm]
Here’s the hive: [nggtags gallery=hive]

As you can see, there’s wax now. Wax. Meaning it’s a full blown frigging hive. ARGH! Now I gotta pay for someone to take them alive. It seems that no beekeepers want unknown wild bees in the Texas area. I blame killer bees. 🙁

BEES

I have new neighbors. Hundreds of them. Yes. That clump of brown is a swarm of FUCKING BEES. OH GOD!!! I have been told that fire, fire is the only thing that will expunge the horridness of this insect we call a bee. But I can’t do that to the poor devils. It’s a swarm of honeybees. Non Africanized. They’re just homeless little buggers looking for a place to set up shop , make more bees, and make delicious honey. If I weren’t so afraid of them, I’d set up a hive myself. But seriously. They’re bees. Fuck that. They need to go. They’ve been there since Sunday. Everything I read on the Interwebtubes say that they can stay 15 minutes or overnight. It’s Wednesday. Day 4 of the bees. The scouts are supposed to go out and find a spot for a new colony. They have failed. Some enterprising young/old beekeeper can come along and give them a home. This would be optimal. Either that or their queen is dead/injured. This would be bad and sub-optimal. No queen, no colony. Swarm dies. 🙁

I sent an email to a guy who says he removes swarms for free (yay!). We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, I keep peeking out the back door, hoping they’ve legged it.