Bob: Hear that buzzing?
Me: There is no buzzing!
The Sunday before Labor Day I played in an all day golf. Knowing this, daughter Luan and her husband Bob Offer decided to use my home as a campground, picnic area and all-around place to raise cain (leaving their own home tidy and clean).
They used my kitchen as a staging area: preparing hors d’oeuvres (I always have to look up the spelling of that word-or is it two words?), mixing concoctions and shouting what they believe are smart remarks to whomever.
On Labor Day Bob called and asked if I heard bees buzzing in the ceiling corner of my kitchen.
I listened, heard nothing and continued thinking what I’ve always thought about this son-in-law.
But, like other things he’s said, the thought lingered. After a few days I decided to look out a window in the floor above where the imagined buzzing took place.
Son of a gun! There were bees flying around, chasing each other into a separation in my siding. I went downstairs and tapped on the kitchen ceiling with a stick. I reasoned, that will scare them and they’ll flit.
To reassure myself, I went back to that window a couple days later. Darned if another set of bees hadn’t replaced those I scared with the stick.
Off to the hardware for some Wasp/Hornet/Yellow Jacket killer foam by Ortho. Back to the window, empty the can toward the hole while bees buzzed around, and start mowing the lawn.
A few more days passed before I checked the foam discouragement. The bees were still carrying loads in their bellies and coming out thinner. Back to the hardware for a couple more cans of growth altering ingredients.
Now the spraying got to be fun. I’d wait until a half dozen were about to enter the nest and try to shoot them out of the air with the aerosol, while at the same time filling the hole.
More days passed. It was now three weeks past Labor Day. Time to admit Bob might have been right in suggesting I get an exterminator. (Luan told me to wait ’til winter and let ’em freeze.)
Enter Bob Bartenbaker, exterminator extra-ordinaire, of Quality Pest Control, Clarkston. He said my bees were Yellow Jackets. And (there is always an and) there are usually 4,000 to 8,000 Yellow Jackets in a hive like this. I figure I knocked off about 25 with my sharp-shootin? ways, leaving 3,975 to 7,975 of the buzzers.
He said, ‘Let me get my stethoscope and ladder.? I didn’t say it, but thought, ‘Stethoscope, right!?
Up on the ladder, ‘Dr.? Bartenbaker plugged his hearer into his ears and touched the listener end to the ceiling.
‘WOW!? he exclaimed.
He moved the stethoscope about a foot, listened and said, ‘Ohmygod!?
Of course, I took these exclamations to mean the previously agreed to price was about to be renegotiated.
The doctor put what seemed to be pieces of duct tape on the ceiling, slit them with a knife and sprayed his own aerosol can into the slits.
Then he took a little bellows and pumped powdered eliminator into the slits.
The man obviously knew what he was doing, and he did it fast. He said, ‘They should all be eliminated in two days, and you’ll have to get a repair man to replace that part of the ceiling the Yellow Jackets ate away.?
Apparently they like gypsum.
Please do not take this confession to mean I have changed my mind about my daughter’s husband.