I guess I’m just a sensitive guy. Maybe too sensitive. I can smell a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie from two miles if the wind is in my favor. Hence I prefer my wife leave the county if she is going to fart. But I digress. It’s not just smells that trigger my senses. Sounds, particularly high frequencies, distract me from my daily routine - well, frequently. Strobes capacitors charging, pocket camera humming, a child laughing, pointing at me, judging my fresh haircut. Oh the sounds that haunt! And what do I find one of the most distracting sounds of all?

A bug whizzing about my melon.

Three weeks ago I awoke in the early morning hours (around 10:30 am) to the sound of what I thought could only be a fly barnstorming my ear canal. I groaned and swatted at the blurry landscape of my palatial boudoir like a zombie at a meeting of The Red Hat Society. By the time my brain was as awake as my hearing bone I forgot about the fly. The next night at 3 am that million-eyed monster was back. At least it sounded like it. I was too tired to do anything more than think to myself, “House flies live what, like 3 days tops?” Mistake!

Just about every night this creep broke me from my dreams. As the day went on, like I was under some sort of spell, I forgot to hunt the immortal super-fly down for extraction. That is until one night when I heard it before I went to bed. Suddenly I realized it wasn’t a fly in my bedroom. It’s the circuit breaker box on the outside bedroom wall. So I headed outside in the thick of night armed only with my favorite flashlight and a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves to protect me from the spitting electrical sparks.

What do I find outside? A black-rimmed hole in the wall about the size of silver dollar. Oh, and 50 bees crawling in and out of it! An evil colony of bees had made a hive of unseen scale INSIDE the wall of my house. MY HOUSE!

So I stuck my finger in the crawling bee hole–

No. I ran into the house screaming, leaving my wife outside to fend off the bee brigade that never came. Eventually she talked me into opening the door so she could come back inside and figure out what to do.

There is a bee shortage, so we didn’t want to kill the bees. Instead we hired A Bee Man (that’s the name of their company), to come out, smoke the bees to make them all drunk, tear a hole in the wall, pull out the 6 eighteen inch honeycombs, rescue 5000 sleepy bees and one pissed off queen.

Sure there’s a giant hole in the wall of my house. (Actually they’ve plastered it back up now.) And I’m out almost half a grand for the pleasure. But at least some avocado farm in Ventura will have some new bees to help keep the dream alive. And now I can get some sleep - that is if the kid down the street would stop laughing at my hair.

These images were taken using a
Canon 5D with a Canon 24-105 L .

Del.icio.us | Technorati | Stumble it! | Digg