Oh Bee-have

So I've had quite an exciting day. Here I was online doing a bit of blogging on friendship day and my dear mother calls me and is like "Farah... don't go out on the balcony right now there's a bee hive on the clothes rack." My instant reaction... "OH SHIT!" And then she goes on to explain like how dad had gone out on the balcony in the morning and there was nothing there and within the hour when she went out there was a swarm of bees in the corner of the clothes rack and she saw it just in time before putting the clothes on the rack.. blah blah blah! My blog entry about friendship day went down the toilet as I started freaking out about the bees.

Now I'm terrified of bees because of this movie I saw where these killer bees were going around killing people and it was sooo freakishly icky. Now we don't get these kind here so they were just your run of the mill honey bees but they have stingers too and they are not as cute and cuddly like in the cartoons.

So I go into the living room and pull back the curtains and find this heart/udder shaped swarm in one corner of the clothes rack and thank my stars that I'm on the other side of the glass door. I quickly go and get my camera and take a few pictures and send it to my mom at work. It was twice as big as she saw it earlier in the morning... and yes I was freaking out and was thinking that by the time our building maintenence people come in the evening at 5 the hive would be HUUUUUGE!

My friends try to calm me down by telling me that bee hives are lucky and were telling me that a lady had a hive in her back yard and when she didn't remove it it was all around her house and she had honey worth $3 million dollars and she became rich and is now breeding bees. And I'm thinking... hmmmm I am unemployed but yeah no... rather take my chances on a lottery to become a millionaire.


So my mom comes home in sometime and our building watchman comes with these two guys and there begins our "Sting Operation". Now were thinking of ways to get rid of it and one of the guys was like fire will get rid of them and the other who probably had a boner for the bees was like "Oh no.. that will kill them." And I was like "So... kill em'!" (sorry I'm not merciful when it comes to creatures that can kill me in one sting/bite). And then we thought let's smoke em' out. We get a metal bowl like thing we use to burn sandalwood and incense charcoal when we pray and that doesn't give us much smoke but the bees do start flying away. But not entirely... and then our men decide to take a long broom and break the hive by standing inside and manuvering the handle from a little space between the balcony door (where the open bits were sealed off by a few newspapers)... ahhhh success and lo and behold they had just started to build the comb and it was around 4-5 inches big.

Now the bees were pissed off and flying off here and there and we're like now what? Idea no. 365739 hot water in a spray can. Did that and well it seemed to work. Just then our watchman gets a call and it's the lady below our apartment and the bees apparently started making a hive there. (Talk about persistence) and they were there with a vengence because the hive in their balcony was bigger than ours.

So after that ordeal some bees were still flying around on the balcony so mom and I decided to smoke them out. We made a small fire in that metal thing again and this time added camphor and sandalwood shavings and wooooo smoke city. We did that a couple of times and now hopefully we're bee free.

And yes I did get my first sting today. I was putting out another bowl of camphor smoke in the night and I had worn a sweater (in 47 degrees heat) just incase there were any stray bees there and i felt something prick me and I thought ahh it's just the sweater biting me ohhh but nooo... I have a nice small bump on my arm. Apparently a bee managed to sting me but I think it was a bit disoriented with the smoke and it was a hit n' miss and just felt like a sweater bite... it smarts a bit now.

But anyhoos... take a look at the pic of the hive. It's icky!!

Doesn't it look like a cow's udder? lol