Winter's upon us now, and in full flower. We've had our first snow, there's been talk of the construction of an igloo, a snowfolk man was designed to inhabit it, it was decreed he would be armed with a twig spear, and tiny snowseals were promised for him to be able to hunt with said spear... you know, all the classic hallmarks of nature's annual wardrobe shift. Here are the detailed prelim design schematics:
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| We have an opening for "design team" currently. Please submit all applications via carrier pigeon. |
And with all the earmarks of the seasonal shifting upon us, we... ...we...
Hang on. That man... that snowfolk man. Did you really look at him?
At first glance, he merely looks happy. Then you look again, closer.
He's... he's terrifying. He's like something out of a child's snowy nightmare.
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| FLEE, TINY SEALS! FOR I AM HE WHO IS CALLED DEATH!! |
*coughs* Anyway...
With all the earmarks of the seasonal shifting upon us, we had nothing on our plates but the leisure to turn our minds to the joy of the holidays, the peace and calm comfort of the love of our families, and the general underlying sense of peace and joy that so suffuse this time of year. Right?
...Right??
Let me start at the relative beginning.
Some months ago, when the sunlight lasted for more than five minutes every day* and the sky didn't periodically throw the most passive-aggressive tiny snowballs ever at you every time you turned around, my little sister and I found a bee inside the apartment. This was briefly terrifying to Sister, and she scampered away at a rate of speed usually required for aircraft to achieve lift, or for when I point in a crowd and say "isn't that Patrick Stewart over there?"
* Observation made by a gentleman accustomed to awakening between 12-3pm each day.
I managed to catch the bee by placing a cup against the window, and sliding a piece of paper between the lip and the glass, then folding the edges carefully over in a circular pattern so there wouldn't be room for it to crawl out in a crease, and then carefully double-checking the edges to make sure I hadn't missed anything. By the time I was done and felt comfortable pulling the glass off of the window, the sun had risen and set twice more, and I needed to shave again. I could have probably made a perfect scale origami model of the Statue of Liberty in less time. Sister didn't seem to notice the inherent hypocrisy of my mocking her for being so afraid of a single bee, then painstakingly building paper Shawshank around it before I felt comfortable moving it a single inch, though, so I kept my illusions quiet and to myself.
We put the bee outside. By that I mean I carried the flawless prison model outside and down the front steps, out into the grass, and threw them apart while simultaneously turning and running away. I'm not even sure the word "running" describes it correctly. My escape actually looked more like this:
Have I mentioned what a manly man I am?
That was the end of the saga of bee, or so we thought. It turns out we were living in the shadow and illusory safety of false assumptions, having assumed that the bee had simply snuck inside while one of us was coming in or out of the front door one day. Thus had he been returned the same way (albeit slightly more confused and with an urge to seek out Andy Dufresne), and all was well and balanced in the universe. Mistake.
The bee, it was later to be found, most likely responded to these events by shaking off his wings, taking off, flying twenty-six feet around to the back of the apartment building, and crawling right back into the vent where he and his dark brethren had constructed their evil nest of evil. The bees were our neighbors, though we yet knew it not. Slowly we started to learn.
As the autumn came to a close, a few more bees made themselves known within the apartment. We would always locate them by their telltale buzz against one of the windows, fighting valiantly against the glass (which I can only think bees everywhere must see as some kind of insidious other kind of air that hates bees and loves to play tricks upon them). The cup-plus-legendary-origami method worked great for these scattered few as well, and little attention was paid to any possibility of an alarming trend just getting started. I suppose in the back of my mind I thought that with the waning of the autumn the bees were, like, lined up and waiting underneath the awning outside our front door for one of us to open it so they could stealthily make their way inside under a tiny cardboard box like Solid Snake. My mind is funny like that sometimes. Given the unspoken choice between the likelihood of bees having some interior entrance to the apartment, or bees who are highly-trained stealth operatives watching and memorizing our patrol routes to take advantage of a maybe twice-daily opportunity, I will always predictably assume the more complex possibility and begin cheerfully planning totally unnecessary countermeasures in the wrong direction. This makes for fantastic adventure stories, and absolutely ineffective efforts.
One night after letting a bee out the door again that morning, I was sitting at this very keyboard having a think, when I heard an odd sort of *clink* sound above my head. A glance up at the light fixture showed an odd little shadow on the other side of the frosted glass. A shadow that was moving. I stood on my bed to have a peek in, and saw from about one foot away that a bee had crawled through one of the screw holes in the light fixture and fallen into the glass covering, but had apparently broken something necessary in doing so. It sort of writhed around for a minute, then fell still... and I finally had the thought that maybe the bees weren't coming in through the front door all this time after all. I cocked my head and had a quick mental count and realized I had so far put nine bees outside using my patented method. They were somehow living in the ceiling between our apartment, and the one upstairs?! Either that, or... dear god. The apartments upstairs were entirely full of bees, and we were just catching their imperialistic, expansionist overflow. Had they overtaken our neighbors in a daring blitzkrieg weeks before, their decomposing bodies still lying at this very moment underneath an undulating carpet of living bee not seven feet above my head?? I had to plan for any and all possibilities. I picked up the phone, my most determined look on my face, and slid out the keyboard sexily. It was time.
Time... to tweet.
Here follows the Twitter posts from that day, detailing the events of what I started out calling "Operation Intercept."
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| The realization that the bees would not, as I had believed before, stop coming in as the weather got colder, but would instead probably double or triple their efforts, pushed me to action. Military action. I put on my robe and wizard hat. |
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| Operation Intercept was a go. It was time to find out where the enemy kept striking from, once and for all. I took a prisoner. Same method. |
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| I had good men under my command. (I was alone in the house.) A little field commending never hurt anybody. The bee was probably a bit confused as to whom I kept addressing loudly as "soldier!" though, as I paced around talking to myself. |
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| This was a great way for me to avoid having to admit that I wasn't quite sure how I was going to get the bee to "talk" to me about much of anything. I tried striking up conversation the way I usually do with cute girls at the grocery store, but I don't think it had ever even seen a single episode of Glee. |
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| I'd had a genius idea. I took him outside and let him go, but didn't Swan Lake my way to extremely gay safety this time. Instead I watched him collect himself, and shake off the horrors of his brief imprisonment. After a couple of years of heavy drinking, a tough-loving family intervention, and a brief stint in rehab, he took flight and traveled... right around the house. I followed. It was seriously like twenty-five feet. I had spent collective hours catching and releasing bees that were then turning around and climbing right back inside and down into the apartment again. It's actually feasible that I caught the same bee twice at some point, but due to reprehensible levels of hitherto-unintentional bee racism thought they all looked alike and didn't notice. |
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| The vents serve as exhaust ports for the bathroom fans in each apartment. I took some small measure of revenge in the idea that the price the bees had paid for their little occupation was having to live within the smell of every good-sized poop Sister and I had used the fan to clear away over the past quarter of a year. |
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| The vent had around thirty bees lazily flying in and out of the cracked edges, and I could see the shape of a small nest just inside. It was time to get serious. My real-life backup arrived as I was standing outside taking these photos. What I had been referring to as my "First Recon sniper unit" in each Twitter post was actually the weary-eyed maintenance man wielding about eight full cans of spray poison. |
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| I scampered in after he was done going to town on the vent to take this casualty photo of the ones that had fallen below. Some of them were still twitching and writhing around from the poison. It was morbid of me, I know... but this was war. And war... war never changes. |
The bees lay defeated. Their dark stronghold... destroyed. We were victorious! First Recon put out their collective cigarette with a tired sigh, climbed back into a beat-up old truck and drove off someplace where there was less bee and more beer. I went back inside, secure in our victory and ready to celebrate with some tasty kettle corn and an episode of Burn Notice. Oh, I was sure one or two more survivors from deep inside might still crawl down after darkfall some night (they were attracted to the light shining up through the light fixture screw holes, it turns out, and would come to investigate at night through any fixture in which we'd left the bulbs burning for any length of time), but we could simply kill them and eventually be done with the whole unpleasant affair.
We were wrong again. The bees kept coming, and in greater numbers. I can only imagine how many of them were actually living in the six-inch space between the two apartments; the nest we'd found by the entrance was the military equivalent of a single guard tower in Warcraft, just a forward position from which they could send out raiders to bring back loot, liquor and captured slave bee women for their barbaric bee nightfire celebrations. In fact, having poisoned and then blocked off their only convenient exit (the maintenance guy came back sometime later and sealed it up with foam insulation, trapping them inside), the bees slowly started to realize that if they wanted their food/booze/beepoon fixes, they were going to have to come inside now and take it from us. Sister and I started to encounter between two and five bees each day, and we lived in constant fear of more. We went nowhere unarmed; a bee-killing gauntlet of death was near at all times (this was in actuality a common foot slipper, worn on the hand for absurdly girly swats at invading bees, or for when Sister wanted to kill one). Our favorite freebies were when the bees would choose the kitchen light fixture to descend through, since it was encased entirely in glass rather than just consisting of a frosted drop plate like the others. This meant that any bee soldier foolish enough to choose that entrance would fall into a small, super-heated glass Thunderdome of death, damned to burn and die in short order with no time to write a will for his family back home, leaving them destitute and squabbling over who would get the deed to the speedboat and grandma's old knickknack collection, and all because of that bee's lack of foresight and bad career planning. At the time of this writing, there are somewhere around twenty bee corpses in there, creating a morbid shadow effect all across the food preparation surfaces in our kitchen and generally bringing good cheer.
No, I'm not going to take it off and clean it out. There could be more bees up there crouched by the entrances, lying in wait for me to do just that. Don't be silly.
In the end, the problem was solved by a different method entirely. I waited until daylight, stood on a chair, and put tape over the screw holes on each light fixture. I used black electrical tape so the heat from the incandescents wouldn't slowly erode its stickiness, and not at all because it was the first and only roll of tape I could find and I'm really quite lazy. Since then, we haven't seen a single bee. The war seems to be over.
But we'll never really know until spring comes around. I shall spend my winter deep in study, practicing my en dehors pirouette over and over and harsh drilling over again until it is flawless, the stuff of legends, for the day the tiny bee Khan living in our ceiling rallies his tiny horseborne banded beeshiks and ventures into our lands again.
Stay tuned.
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