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The Honeycomb Said "Roanoke"
Mar. 24th, 2008 02:13 pm
I met ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
toob for lunch at Togo's today; you know, it was really great. I had the turkey and cranberry sandwich I had long been craving, it was great, and we talked about the story that he was working on. He also nearly broke the umbrella outside, but I promised him I wouldn't tell anyone. (That last sentence was a blatant lie.)
He had discovered a beehive that had been made inside a tree that must have been hollowed out. It was really neat to see. With all the news recently about Colony Collapse Disorder, it's becoming more and more amazing to see a beehive. I never thought a swarm of bees would be something that made you feel hopeful instead of...filled with respectful dread, but there you go.
A few other bystanders started to gawk with us, and we got to talking. Apparently, bees are making hives inside buildings more and more; one fellow told us about a monstrous hive that made honey drip from roof to ceiling of the University's science building. When they fumigated, this man said, there was a pile of bees six feet long and almost knee-deep.
That last detail was pretty chilling. Didn't they know that bees were inexplicably disappearing? I wanted to say. Wow, is what I said instead.
When I worked at Bookbuyers, a hive set up shop somewhere in the ventilation system. There was an opening to the hive just above the back door and the front door, and through the vent shafts of both bathrooms upstairs. As you might guess, this was cause for all sorts of bee-related toilet-based hilarity. After both rooms were shut down for the umpteenth time by a surprise swarm, it was decided something needed to be done about it.
Extracting hives from buildings, it turns out, is an incredible endeavor. It's also insanely expensive -- it costs about ten times as much as having a guy come out and kill everything with poison gas. Bookbuyers, despite being enormous hippies, were driven to kill off the bees in the end. It was just too expensive to do anything else.
I wonder how many other times this story has been repeated throughout California, possibly the country. If bees are being killed off en masse every time they set up shop inside a building, then maybe it's not such a big mystery where they're all going.
toob for lunch at Togo's today; you know, it was really great. I had the turkey and cranberry sandwich I had long been craving, it was great, and we talked about the story that he was working on. He also nearly broke the umbrella outside, but I promised him I wouldn't tell anyone. (That last sentence was a blatant lie.)He had discovered a beehive that had been made inside a tree that must have been hollowed out. It was really neat to see. With all the news recently about Colony Collapse Disorder, it's becoming more and more amazing to see a beehive. I never thought a swarm of bees would be something that made you feel hopeful instead of...filled with respectful dread, but there you go.
A few other bystanders started to gawk with us, and we got to talking. Apparently, bees are making hives inside buildings more and more; one fellow told us about a monstrous hive that made honey drip from roof to ceiling of the University's science building. When they fumigated, this man said, there was a pile of bees six feet long and almost knee-deep.
That last detail was pretty chilling. Didn't they know that bees were inexplicably disappearing? I wanted to say. Wow, is what I said instead.
When I worked at Bookbuyers, a hive set up shop somewhere in the ventilation system. There was an opening to the hive just above the back door and the front door, and through the vent shafts of both bathrooms upstairs. As you might guess, this was cause for all sorts of bee-related toilet-based hilarity. After both rooms were shut down for the umpteenth time by a surprise swarm, it was decided something needed to be done about it.
Extracting hives from buildings, it turns out, is an incredible endeavor. It's also insanely expensive -- it costs about ten times as much as having a guy come out and kill everything with poison gas. Bookbuyers, despite being enormous hippies, were driven to kill off the bees in the end. It was just too expensive to do anything else.
I wonder how many other times this story has been repeated throughout California, possibly the country. If bees are being killed off en masse every time they set up shop inside a building, then maybe it's not such a big mystery where they're all going.
