Hellish morning

[Goc]

OMG Brian! Must have been a funny thing to see the expert fleeing, though.

@jonnylane:
LOL

[Brian Ellis]

Just lit the fire again to a nice blazing roar to try an rid us of the residues still flying around.

Who's for a BeeBeeQ?

[jonnylane]

LOL!

[Brian R.]

Smoke generator?

[Drizzt]

Next time, do the trick:
1) Take a pot with a bit of wine.
2) Lit the fire
3) Place the pot on the fire.

Voila'!

[Nowhere]

Brian, you mean they've built this thing in a matter of hours?

[Tjalfe]

there was nothing build...it is all bees .. don't you watch the discovery channel
the bees follow the queen around trying to locate a new home.. given time, they might have build a nest there, removing the queen ( not something I would dare) would make them go away.. maybe a flamethrower would have worked good

Kasper

[Nowhere]

that dark thing attached to the chimney isn't nest?! Those are all bees?!

[Brian Ellis]

That mass of bees, occupying a tightly packed volume I would estimate at about 10 litres, with very little air between them, settled there in less than 10 minutes. If the estimated volume taken by a single insect were 1/4 cm3, this would mean ~40,000 beasties.

Current situation: I filled 2 vacuum cleaner bags, probably 2 litres each, with corpses from indoors. There were at least a litre of crematable corpses in the fireplace before I lit the fire. I brushed up a good, thick, shovelful of cadavers from a verandah which possibly received half of those that fell outdoors, the rest falling invisibly onto a gravel drive and a lawn. There are still small numbers falling, legs waving, ready to receive apian extreme unction and last rites. A very few are still buzzing round the chimney and I can see odd clumps of presumably dead ones matted together.

Anyway, the panic's over but I would not like to go through that experience again.

Five large aerosol cans of insecticide were used.

[Sethos]

that's enough to make one bug-a-phobic...but it could have been worse...could have been hornets yikes!!

~Sethos

[Brian Ellis]

Well, my wife is bug-a-phobic and she was not at all a happy bunny. She shut herself in the bedroom and stayed there for three hours. I've become slightly apiphobic, at least for the time being! No honey for breakfast, thanks

Yikes, yes. Hornets are real nasties: would have meant the cyanide gang and heavy artillery! By coincidence, there was one in the garden this morning.

[Jammrock]

That's what you get for using pollen and honey to clean your chimney!

Jammrock

[Greebe]

Brian same thing happened to a friend of mine in rural North Carolina, but instead of killing them all off (pfff @ that so called expert) he sealed up the fireplace inside and got a bee keeper in to help with the situation two days later. He smoked the chimney from downstairs and retieved the majority of the hive for relocation on his property.

[Brian Ellis]

Yes, Greebe, that is what the final expert had wanted to do. The problem is that the fire brigade had used their 200 bar jet hose on them, in the hopes of dislodging them. It certainly upset a lot of them and had spread them out from a compact mass into a disordered set of bunches. He decided that, as he had no idea where the queen was or even if she was still there and, if so, alive. He therefore decided extermination was the only way. He gave the fire brigade a flea in their collective ear, though! This was because of their method, not only ineffective and brutal, but it meant he was under much attack while he was within close range of them.

The strange thing about the whole story is that only one person got stung: the first "expert", the one who ran away. The stupid bugger shouldn't have opened the fireplace. He didn't have any protective clothing!

[Nowhere]

Well, than that isn't so bad I suppose - sooner or later society probably won't have to deal with the first one