Killer Bees Attack

Yesterday we were attacked by bees. Our house that is. I came downstairs to talk to Grant, who was calmly sitting on the couch checking his email. A large dark moving mass outside caught my eye. I recoiled in horror and made a slight choking noise. Grant looked up and said, what's wrong, follows my line of vision and exclaimed, "Oh my gosh! I didn't even notice that!" A large group of bees had decided that our sliding glass door was the perfect place to start a new hive.

According to Wikipedia:

Swarming is the natural means of reproduction of honey bee colonies (considering the

colony as the organism rather than individual bees which cannot survive alone), including the domesticated Western honey bee. In the process two or more colonies are created in place of the original single colony. 

New honey bee colonies are formed when queen bees leave the colony with a large group of worker bees, a process called swarming. The first or prime swarm generally goes with the old queen. As soon as the swarm is established as a new colony, the bees raise a new queen, or sometimes a replacement virgin queen is already present in the swarm. Afterswarms are usually smaller and are accompanied by one or more virgin queens. Sometimes a beehivewill swarm in succession until it is almost totally depleted of workers.

Swarming is mainly a spring phenomenon, usually within a two or three week period, the usual period depending on the locale. But occasional swarms can happen throughout the producing season.

I felt very torn about what to do about it. They had apparently come in the early morning and hadn't had time to start building their nest. We debated calling the landlord, or pest control, or even a beekeeper if we could find one. However, being a holiday weekend, we doubted we could get anyone to come before tuesday. Unable to bear the thought of them possibly squeezing their way into the house, we finally decided to go out and get some wasp and hornet killer. We thought about getting a trap, but none of the ones at Lowe's could catch anywhere near the amount of bees we had. Our guestimatation of the number is in the 300-500 bee range. 

After bundling up in a waterproof windbreaker with hood, Grant bravely got out a ladder and squirted down the bees - first with bug spray, then with the hose. A few bees (the forensics team, as I called them) bravely tried to come back to the same spot to reconstruct the crime, but, after we come back home after being out for a few hours, they had given up. Grant straightaway sprayed away all the wreckage. Now the bees' crumpled corpses litter the driveway under our balcony.