56 Pounds

Most. Disgusting. Weekend. Ever.

My wife, our friend Jeff, and I spent about seven hours riding the trails at Shindagin Forest in Ithaca last Friday. The weather was cool and dry, perfect for a day in the woods. We finished off the adventure with a nice dinner at the Commons and then headed home. With a full day of recreating under my belt, I was ready to tackle some big house projects over the three day Labor Day weekend. Well, at least I thought I was ready.

It had been a full two days since I’d seen any bee activity in the attic. I had told myself that after two days of inactivity, I’d start digging further into the wall to really get a feel for the size of the battle before me.

Let’s review for you latecomers. When we looked at our current house in October of last year before buying, we saw some honeybees entering the outside wall between the attic windows. There’s a decorative, flared section of the wall, providing a perfect triangular void for insects to set up a nicely protected home. A helpful neighbor said that the previous owners had, from time to time, battled bees. We decided that the bees wouldn’t stop us from buying the house, even though by the time we’d close on it, they’d have had at least a full year of hive building completely unopposed since the previous owners had moved out the previous February. Sue is allergic to bee stings, and the bees were finding their way under the baseboards into our finished attic gym. Doing situps with bees crawling around on the floor didn’t sound like a fun idea. In addition, the outer wall of the house showed some evidence of stains from dripping honey from years past. We decided that the bees had to go. I read up on getting rid of problem honeybees and the news wasn’t good. We wanted to take them out alive, but all indications were that beekeepers wouldn’t want to do the carpentry work to get them out, and exterminators would cost an arm and a leg and kill the bees anyway. Advice on Cornell University's web pages said honeybees in a house required a professional exterminator to come in, kill the bees, and remove the hive and honey combs. Professional, shmofessional, I thought. I could take care of this myself. Pushing my guilt aside, my battle began with some tubes and Sevin-5 poison in powder dust form. I made myself a bee suit, cut a section of the drywall away, drilled a peephole, fashioned a poison dust puffer from tubing and an old bike pump, and applied doses daily for a couple weeks, inside the hive from the back and also into the outside entrance, which I reached through an open window with the tubing duct taped to an unwound wire clothes hanger. Whenever I had a hole in the wall, I’d put up screen to keep the little buggers as contained as possible.

So, finally, last Saturday morning arrived and I hadn’t seen any movement or heard the usual buzzing in two days. The smell from the wall was becoming stomach turning. A few thousand dead, rotting bees put off an indescribable smell. I donned the bee suit and started cutting the hole in the drywall bigger, then bigger, then bigger. My bee suit consists of a layer of cycling rainsuit plus plastic-coated painting overalls, so I end up soaked with sweat within ten minutes. It's terribly fun. As I cut further into the wall, I discovered that someone had done this very thing at least once before. The sections of drywall I cut away revealed a wooden panel screwed into place over a hole that had been cut in the original wallboards. I unscrewed the board, held my breath, and pulled it out.

Oh. My. God. Filling the cavity before me was layer after layer of honeycomb. Underneath the comb, the void in the wall was filled with little rotting corpses. I set down several garbage bags to cover the carpet, with one open in a milk crate, and began pulling out the comb, chiseling it away from the slanting wallboards, and filling the garbage bag. It was heavy with honey, and it dripped down my rubber gloves, over my tools, onto the corpses below, and covered everything. There is a wall partition to the right, but to the left, the hive extended into another wall section. Bees occasionally popped out from that side, angrily checking me out and then heading to a nearby window. I spent Saturday cleaning out the right side, and then screened it all up for the night. The work was messy and the smell disgusting, but otherwise it was very interesting. Little did I know the next day would be oh so much worse.

On Sunday, I cut away the drywall on the left, found another screwed-in panel, and removed that. The left side of the void was filled again with comb, but most of it looked different. I knew that this side must be where the brood comb would be, where the baby bees are raised. The smell was heavier here, and I occasionally escaped outside to take breaths of fresh air. I dug out the comb, filling another garbage bag. The honeycomb on this side was at the top, and then I got down into the brood comb. I pulled out the layers, revealing piles of squirming, maggot-like larvae. Between the sight of the wriggling grubs on the wall and on my hands, and the smell of the rotting insects below, it took quite a bit of willpower to keep my lunch down. If anyone had been walking below the open window, they would have heard some gasps, exclamations, near-gags and a lot of colorful language. By Sunday evening, I’d cleared out the left side. The next day, I’d tackle the bottom of the wall void.

I set up a third garbage bag Monday morning, and began scooping out the layers of dead insects, bee waste, pollen, and other rotting material that had been compacted in the wall over the past couple years. I wiped cologne under my nose and wore a facemask to try to keep the smell at bay, but it worked only for a couple minutes before the odor became overpowering again. It was not my idea of a fun time. With my face inches away from honey-covered roofing nails and dead bee larvae still stuck to the wall, I reached deep into the hole and dug out rotting, stinking death and waste.

I filled a third garbage bag, then sprayed down the wall with a bleach-water solution to try to knock down the smell. I’ll let it set open for a few days to dry out, then I’ll staple up the inside of the outer wall with some sort of insect barrier, then fill the void with insulation, put back the wood panels, then patch up the drywall.

In the end, I removed fifty-six pounds of honey and brood comb. No joke. I'll say that again. I carried out fifty-six pounds of honey, wax, and bee larvae in three full milk crates. I kept my food down during the entire three-day process, so I’m calling it a success so far. This weekend will definitely be recorded as my most disgusting Labor Day weekend ever.