It's not that Matt didn't do everything he could do get rid of our friendly infestation. He dressed in his best homemade beer keeper outfit...
and built a contraption to try to combat the bees from the outside:In retrospect, it may not have been surprising that sealing up the house and sucking the bees into a ShopVac only put a Band-Aid on the problem. It was a lot of fun, but it was a Band-Aid nonetheless.
Finally, Matt found the source of our buzzing buddies. He cut a hole in our basement ceiling and found a papery hive the size of a basketball:
When a strategically placed bug bomb only killed the bees that were already outside of the hive, we decided it was time to call in a professional. Never having called an exterminator before, we called a big-name company, Terminix. The technician who arrived was pleasant enough, but he nearly fell off the ladder when he saw the hive. He then screamed like a child and ran upstairs, waving his arms wildly above his head (no exaggeration). Matt followed him up the stairs and said, as only Matt can say, "I have to tell you, dude. That reaction doesn't inspire confidence."
The Terminix guy made a few frantic calls to superiors, all of whom told him that it was "illegal" to remove bees and that our only solution was a year-long contract involving the spraying of various chemicals. When he hung up the phone, I told him there was no such law and he said, "Yeah...I really don't know." Never being happy with the idea of either spraying needless chemicals or giving money to big business, Matt and I decided to keep our options open.
The next day, we found a listing for a local bee-removal specialist. John Roswell's company (if one could even call it that) was nothing fancy--just a one-man operation. He drove up to our house in an old Chevrolet Astro van, and he stepped out with a big glove and a stick. While the Terminix man (aka "Chemical Ali") ran away from our problem, John climbed up the ladder, sprayed something on the hive to kill all the bees, then used the big stick to poke at the hive. He then went out to his van for an old cardboard box and scraped the hive remains into it. We told him that the Terminix guy said he'd never seen anything like our hive. John laughed and said, "Then he hasn't seen that much."
After the entire hive was removed, John showed us the larve in the hive and explained how queens are bred and the hives are built, all the while speaking with a sense of respect for his 30-year adversary. By the end of the conversation, all three of us were captivated by what had once been an infestation. This is just a tiny piece of what was extracted from our ceiling:
John was a mixture of insane bravery and old-school charm. He charged half what Terminix would have, but I would have paid him twice as much.
