OK. If you read about the bee fiasco the other day, the saga continues. If you have no idea what I’m talking about click HERE to catch-up. Otherwise this blog probably won’t make any sense to you.
Anyway, we knew that after we were attacked and held captive by the bees, we had to do something. It was way too dangerous to try and co-exist with the bees now that they were being so aggressive. So Matthew told us that one of his friends here on the mountain was a professional “bee guy” or something like that. He said that, “he had one of those bee suits and everything (and I guess if you have one of the suits that it makes you an expert, right?).” So, I told Matthew to go ahead and ask him to help us.
The guy’s name is Rato (pronounced hot-too, which means rat in Portuguese). I know what you’re thinking, don’t ask me, I have no idea. Anyway, Rato agreed to help us out of our dilemma. He planned on coming over after the Thursday Night Discipleship Meeting. Rato is one of the young men that attends periodically. He’s 17 years old and seems like a pretty nice guy (in spite of the fact that he’s named after a disease infested rodent).
After the Discipleship Meeting- Matthew, Rato, Maryssa, Amber, Anna and 2 of my nephews all came to the house to be part of the action. Rato had all of his gear with him and we all watched and listened as he was putting on his suit and making jokes about what he was about to do. After he put his suit on he told me his plan. The first thing he was going to do was pull some of the wood off of the side of our house to expose the hive. Now, the place where this was going to happen was on the 2nd story of our house. There’s an open-air porch up there and the bees had built a nest in the outside wall that separates the porch from Maryssa’s bedroom. Then he said that he was going to pull the hive off and place it in a bucket and take it away. When I asked him where the bucket was, he had no response (and no bucket). He just laughed. This was when the red flags started going off in my mind, but I just went along with it. Then, he explained that the next step was to take gasoline and spray it on the house around the area where the hive use to be. Say what?! Did he just say, “spray gasoline on the house?” OK, hold on there “Mr. Bee Expert.” Everything sounded good right up until the point where you talked about spraying a flammable liquid on a wooden structure way out in the middle of the jungle with hardly any available water and no way to put fires out! So back up... let’s talk about this. How much gas? He said, “about 2 liters.” Seriously? 2 liters!? For some reason the red flags that started going off inside my mind earlier were waving in full force now (I’m perceptive like that, haha). So we talked about it and he told me that it was important because the fumes would keep the bees away. But still, gasoline? It’s flammable and gasoline costs about $1,000,000 a gallon here so can’t we use something else? I had some old diesel fuel in a bottle and he said, “that would work.” I was thinking, “it’s flammable but at least it’s harder to start a fire with diesel than gas,” so we went with that.
So all of us went into the house, up the stairs and then Rato went out the door and onto the porch by himself. I closed the door behind him and locked it from the inside (didn’t know why I locked it, I just felt inspired to, lol!). Then we all went to the windows to watch “the bee professional” in action. He grabbed the crowbar and started pulling the wood off on the side of the house and the bees started swarming in full force. Man, they were ticked-off. But then something seemed wrong... wait a minute! He only had his suit on. He didn’t put his gloves or hood on yet!
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| As you can see, he started without his hood and gloves! |
Then as the bees started stinging him it’s like the lightbulb went off, “oh yeah... I need the rest of my protective equipment on.” So we all watched in disbelief as he frantically put the hood and gloves on. Then he grabbed the 2 liter bottle of diesel and started spraying it everywhere! We could tell that he was still getting stung (bees were inside his hood) but we couldn’t help him. Bees were all over his suit, his gloves and basically weren’t very happy with him.
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| Rato frantically putting on gloves and hood. |
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| Rato spraying diesel fuel everywhere. |
Then, all of a sudden, he ran over to the door and tried to come in, but I had locked it earlier, remember? haha. So he started yelling for us to let him in. Really? Dude, I feel for you but you’re covered in angry bees and there’s a lot of people inside here that really don’t want to be stung. So he he started ripping off his protective suit and swatting bees off of his body then he yelled, “clean!” So we opened the door, he ran in and we slammed the door closed behind him. The girls were screaming, the dogs were barking, the guys were laughing (I actually think it was some type of macho-guy-defense-mechanism-thing to deflect the fact that they were terrified of dying by multiple bee stings), it was total chaos. You could hear all the bees outside hitting the windows, doors and the side of the house. Great! Now we’re hostages inside our house again. There were several bees flying around inside the house too. Especially in Maryssa’s room. We tried killing them (with bug spray and this handheld bug zapper thing somebody sent us from the States) while we waited for the “bee expert” to tell us our next move.
So now what? What’s plan B? As we waited for the bees to settle down (so that everyone could make a run for it and go home) Rato said, “the bees would probably all swarm away on their own in the morning around 7:00am.” How he knew the time, we’ll never know. And who am I to argue? He’s the one with the bee suit so he must be an expert, right? So around 11:00pm the bees had slowed down a little bit (i.e., they weren’t angrily hitting the doors, windows and side of the house anymore.) and the swarm had subsided enough to where everyone could bundle-up and make a run for it. So we counted down... 3,2,1 go! Everyone ran out in a pack and I slammed the door shut behind them as they made their way off the property.
It took until about midnight to kill all the bees that were flying around inside the house but, when we finally killed the last one, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. But I think I might have an ulcer because of all the stress this whole “bee thing” has caused. So now I’ll guess we’ll wait until morning to see if they all “magically” swarm-off somewhere. So, come back for Part 2 tomorrow to find out what happens. But until then bee blessed! Get it? Bee blessed!? Sorry, that was lame, I know. But I couldn’t resist: )
Love Ya,
Jim
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