Dan's Papers - June 6, 2008

In early May, as I have done for each of the last five years, I went out to the brick deck that surrounds my swimming pool to talk to the carpenter bees. It was a sunny day.

"Look," I told three of them as they hovered nearby. "I know there is global warming and it is our fault. And I know we are all supposed to try to get along. And I know that you are friendly and all, and don't bite. But, please, could you go somewhere else?"

It seemed to me that they conferred. One flew over to the other two, and they just hovered there, like little helicopters. Then they flew away, off to tell the others.

I waited. Two days later, there were more of them. On average, I'd say, at any one time, there were maybe 15 of them out in my yard, alternately hovering curiously next to something, then zooming across the deck to a tree or a pool net to check that out.

I must say that these are very impressive creatures. They are the largest of all the bees in the industry. They're black, furry and very easygoing and about the size of your thumb. They have great personality. They hover around in the sunshine, then get together seven feet up above the pool to chat with one another about this or that, then zoom off to sniff the flowers, then buzz over to consider the sleeping Wheaten Terrier. A screen door slams and someone comes out of the house, and they just mosey over to see what that was all about.

I have gotten nowhere with the carpenter bees, and so, at least at first, I try to persuade the rest of my family that they are just our friends. We have our best friend, the dog. Then we have these other best friends, who just hang around and admire us. They mean no harm.

Indeed, it appears to me they don't have a mean bone in their bodies. With regular bees or wasps, if you go over and swat a group of them who are in your way, they become angry. Soon they will attack. It's certainly best to get indoors, and stay there until they calm down.

If you swat at some carpenter bees, however, they chat to one another about this development and then move a few feet further away to hover around, for example, the drainpipe.

It's not hard to see where the carpenter bees come from. They come from the small, seemingly inaccessible attic, above our kitchen. They built a hive there. And they come out and have their little adventure, and then after a while they fly back up there, passing other carpenter bees on their way out. It's a regular parade up there.

When the carpenter bees first made a hive above our kitchen attic five years ago, my initial reaction was fear. What if one of them stung one of us? They're huge. It had to be serious. I called the pest control people. They said some people think of carpenter bees as a blessing. They'd come to bless my garden. It would be a bad thing to get rid of them. They're just there. Try to get used to them. And if you can't, call us back. We'll understand and take care of it. Very understanding, those pest control people.

I tried. I really did. But I'd be lying on a chaise lounge with my eyes closed, and I'd hear one come helicoptering right over my nose, and it would wake me up.

Sorry, it would buzz, and then zoom off.

They never actually landed on me. They'd come cautiously toward me. Then they'd hover. There's Dan. Then they'd fly off.

How DARE I call pest control?

One day my youngest son walked by the pool walking a carpenter bee on a leash. I did a double-take. The son was holding a string, the other end of which was attached to the carpenter bee, who was happily flying along next to the kid, occasionally responding to a tug of the string to go this way and that. They both looked very happy.

"How in hell did you do that?" I asked, sitting up ramrod straight.

"Charlie told me," he said. "You catch a carpenter bee in a cup, then put the cup in the freezer, then 10 minutes later take it out and the carpenter bee is asleep inside. So then you put the string on him. And after a while he wakes up. And then he's your friend."

I had been told by the pest control people that if I could get through six weeks of the carpenter bees, they would hatch their young (or whatever they do), and fly off of their own accord. Live and let live.

"Again, as I said," said the pest control person, "we'll understand." Yeah, like just give us the word and we'll come over and kill everybody.

Why can't I get along with the carpenter bees?

I really tried. But they kept coming over and, and, ANNOYING me. They'd just, well, just get between me and my newspaper, or just get interested in my eyeglasses. As I explained to somebody who asked, it was like you were sitting around poolside with some children, but they weren't YOUR children.

They would have to go.

This was so terrible. It was the weekend just before Memorial Day. I waited for a day when everybody went down to the beach. I picked up the phone, and cupped my hand over the speaker.

"Uh, I need somebody to come over and take care of some carpenter bees," I whispered.

"We understand," the woman said.

The next day, they came. I was not at the house. But later, when I came back, there were no carpenter bees. They sent me a bill for $150, plus tax. I thought - when I die, I will go up to the pearly gates and they will show me this bill and ask what happened to my lovable and very gentle carpenter bees, and I will have to tell them.

And that is exactly what happened, except it was the next day and it was before I died and it was my children who asked. I said a man had come and he had gotten rid of them.

Now, five years later, as they had each spring again and again, the carpenter bees were back. Just a few at first, back then in early May. A couple of scouts.

"I'm really sorry about last year," I said. "I just had to do it. I'm sorry. This is a bad place for a hive. Get it? No?"

They had a little confab about eight feet away from me. He buzzed, we're welcome back. Let's go tell the others. And then they flew off.

The bees, I think, do not have a learning curve. Or else, they only live a few months and die with the searing memory of what happened to the rest of the hive, and the new generation never was old enough to understand what they were telling them about.

The first time the carpenter bees appeared this spring, I also, quite by coincidence, hired a landscaper to come over to have a look at the property and discuss what we might have for a garden or landscaping. She looked up at the house.

"Do you have carpenter bees?"

"See that hole right under the eaves of the roof? That's where they get in. They can chew your house apart. If the vine doesn't get your house first."

The vine she was referring to had been planted by me 30 years ago. It was very tiny at first, but then it had grown up a white column to the top of a trellis over our kitchen deck, and then across the trellis to the roof and up to the top of that. I thought it was a wonderful thing to have a vine encircling your house like that. In the summer, when the wind blew, all the leaves on the vines ruffled against the roof and the shingles. It was so beautiful.

"The vine is crushing your house," the landscaper said.

She showed me where the vine had muscled its way up under the shingles, along the electrical box and even over the kitchen skylight window.

"You're lucky the house hasn't caught fire," she said referring to the electrical box.

She also showed me where the vine, with tentacles as thick around as your wrist, had lifted away the eaves of the roof over the kitchen. "That's where the carpenter bees get in. I think you have to cut all those vines."

I waited only a day. Then I bought a lopper and cut the vines right through at their base. It was like the phrase in prize fighting that goes, "Kill the body, the head will die." The sap in the vines on the roof would come to a halt. In slow motion, maybe over a year, the vine would let go of my house.

Yesterday morning, I flushed the toilet in the downstairs bathroom and heard the unmistakable sound of little birds cheeping. It was quite near. I flushed again as a test and there it was again. Some birds had made a nest in the bathroom fan vent. And the eggs had hatched.

I came out of the bathroom.

"Pretty neat, huh?" Chris, my fiancée, said.

I don't know about you, but I find it very, very hard being green.

Yesterday, after coming out of the bathroom - the cheeping goes on when you first open the door to go in there now - I saw outside the living room slider that a few carpenter bee scouts, out to look for new places for nests, had come back. Some years, a month later, they come back a second time, and some years they don't. I don't know what it depends upon. You'd think after the first treatment, they'd get the message, but they don't.

I'm going back out there to have another talk with them. And if I am not successful, it's going to cost me another $150, plus tax.