The bees covered the floor of the classroom, all dead. Layered on the floor in front of the 12' window, their carcasses were dried and dusty. Every horizontal surface within twenty feet was covered with the bodies. One sad, exhausted - but still alive - bee beat her wings against the window, trying in a vain attempt to escape to the outside where nectar and pollen awaited.
The location was the Southern Cultural Heritage Foundation, housed in a beautiful building from the 19th century. The problem was not the dead bees in the classroom.
The problem was the honey dripping down the walls of the auditorium.
Last Thursday evening I saw a Facebook message on the Central Mississippi Beekeepers Association page. It read:
A follow up message came a few minutes later.
Subject: Bees at the Southern Cultural Heritage Complex-- Vicksburg, MS
The bees are in the attic and honey is leaking though the ceiling! This is the Catholic Complex -- Was St. Francis of Xavier Convent and School before being bought by Southern Cultural. They plan to exterminate the hive if they cannot find someone to get it out. My son works there -- call 769-798-3216 and ask for Isaac. There is an event in the building this Saturday so they have to do something one way or the other by then. Thanks, FH
That location is three blocks from my work. The people are all friends I have worked with before. It was the perfect job for me to go and take a look.
When I got there, the task was much more daunting than I had thought. I knew beforehand that the ceilings were high. But this? This is ridiculous.
You all know the auditorium - it was the set for the political rally in the movie O Brother Where Art Thou? The auditorium has beautiful plaster leading up to a gorgeous old wood ceiling. The building dates to the 1880s, and is part of a complex that dates to the 1830s. It belonged to the Sisters of Mercy, who focused on educating children in Vicksburg from the 19th century onward.
There is a lot of history there.
Understandably, there is also a certain reluctance to indiscriminate ripping out of portions of old walls to get at honeybee hives in the walls. That means constraints on how I do my bee removal job. Preference to avoid damage to the walls inside. To avoid damage to the floors upstairs. To avoid any impact to the exterior of the building.
Quite a lot of restrictions, but I understand them all; I am both an antiquarian and a preservationist. So this fits right in with what I was feeling. But it promised to my my work a lot harder.
First step, though, is to find the bees.
I walked through the areas impacted by the bees, and to everyone's surprise, the bees were not there.
No bees.
OK, so that is not entirely true. There were bees on the outside wall, licking up honey from the side of the building, where honey was oozing through the mortar. There were bees buzzing around the gutter. And the one, lonely, exhausted bee on the inside window upstairs. But what I expected to see was a group of bees, working to cool the entrance to the hive.
There were no such bees.
So the brainstorming began. My coworker LeeAnn and I joined Stacey Mahoney, the director of the center, Isaac, the caretaker of the facilities, and Nancy Bell, the director, and we looked at the classroom, at the auditorium, and the outside.
The place is haunted (so says an ex-employee), and so we discussed the idea of the Ghost Bees - that the bees were all dead, and that they were just creating a wall-ooze to frighten us. Plausible. We also discussed whether the bees were simply scared to death by the ghosts that haunt the place. Sure. Why not? But the best line of the day went to Nancy Bell:
Me, pointing to the wall with honey dripping out: Do you know what this reminds me of?
Nancy Bell: The Amityville Horror?
Me: Well, NOW it does.
(I later recanted, wishing that I had said Zombees from the start.)
After observing the situation from the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner, the southwest corner.... I finally told them I didn't think that the bees had stayed. I gave my reasons:
Both inside and outside.
The problem, I explained, is now quite firmly not a beekeeper problem. But rather a how-do-we-get-the-honey-out-of-the-walls problem.
Brainstorming continued. A tongue-in-cheek suggestion was floated that we refer to it as a miraculous font ("Of Sister So-and-So") and charge donors $100 for a portion of the honey.
Finally, we agreed to the drilling of small holes at the ceiling line inside, to allow the honey to drain out from the walls, but with a straw (or plastic tube) inserted to direct the flow to a place where it could be collected. Instead of the way it was: dripping down the walls.
An hour later, I had several small holes, invisible from the ground level, and straws (which were VERY visible from the ground level) inserted. And no flow at all.
A few modifications later, I reported back to Stacey what I had done.
Me: So, do you want the two pieces of good news, or the one piece of bad news?
Stacey: There is good news? Give me that.
Me: Good news #1. I was right. There were no bees. That means when I drilled the hole in the wall, no horde of angry bees filled the entire auditorium. I guess that is more of a 'not bad news' than a truly 'good news' story, but I work with what I can.
Stacey:....
Me: Good news #2: There is not a huge quantity of honey in the walls. A full hive can have 100 pounds of honey - about 8 gallons (I think I actually said 12 gallons...). And with that much honey in the walls, you would have a spurt of honey when you opened a hole in the walls. And we didn't.
Stacey: That is good news, I guess.
Me: ...which leads to the bad news. The straws did not serve to divert the honey. There was not any build up inside the walls that I could find with the holes that I drilled. So what I did was to stuff paper towels in each crevice where honey was seeping out. The paper towels will eventually saturate, and will have to be replaced, but for the short term, you should be able to clean the floor and not have drips. At least for a few days.
I am headed back tomorrow to put the ladder back up, wipe everything down, and insert a dowel and some putty into the hole. But in the meantime, I will just pray for the soul of Sister So-and-So, and maybe find a market for the honey from her Zombees.
The location was the Southern Cultural Heritage Foundation, housed in a beautiful building from the 19th century. The problem was not the dead bees in the classroom.
The problem was the honey dripping down the walls of the auditorium.
Last Thursday evening I saw a Facebook message on the Central Mississippi Beekeepers Association page. It read:
A follow up message came a few minutes later.
Subject: Bees at the Southern Cultural Heritage Complex-- Vicksburg, MS
The bees are in the attic and honey is leaking though the ceiling! This is the Catholic Complex -- Was St. Francis of Xavier Convent and School before being bought by Southern Cultural. They plan to exterminate the hive if they cannot find someone to get it out. My son works there -- call 769-798-3216 and ask for Isaac. There is an event in the building this Saturday so they have to do something one way or the other by then. Thanks, FH
That location is three blocks from my work. The people are all friends I have worked with before. It was the perfect job for me to go and take a look.
When I got there, the task was much more daunting than I had thought. I knew beforehand that the ceilings were high. But this? This is ridiculous.
You all know the auditorium - it was the set for the political rally in the movie O Brother Where Art Thou? The auditorium has beautiful plaster leading up to a gorgeous old wood ceiling. The building dates to the 1880s, and is part of a complex that dates to the 1830s. It belonged to the Sisters of Mercy, who focused on educating children in Vicksburg from the 19th century onward.
There is a lot of history there.
Understandably, there is also a certain reluctance to indiscriminate ripping out of portions of old walls to get at honeybee hives in the walls. That means constraints on how I do my bee removal job. Preference to avoid damage to the walls inside. To avoid damage to the floors upstairs. To avoid any impact to the exterior of the building.
Quite a lot of restrictions, but I understand them all; I am both an antiquarian and a preservationist. So this fits right in with what I was feeling. But it promised to my my work a lot harder.
First step, though, is to find the bees.
I walked through the areas impacted by the bees, and to everyone's surprise, the bees were not there.
No bees.
 |
| The dark stain is oozing honey. |
There were no such bees.
So the brainstorming began. My coworker LeeAnn and I joined Stacey Mahoney, the director of the center, Isaac, the caretaker of the facilities, and Nancy Bell, the director, and we looked at the classroom, at the auditorium, and the outside.
The place is haunted (so says an ex-employee), and so we discussed the idea of the Ghost Bees - that the bees were all dead, and that they were just creating a wall-ooze to frighten us. Plausible. We also discussed whether the bees were simply scared to death by the ghosts that haunt the place. Sure. Why not? But the best line of the day went to Nancy Bell:
Me, pointing to the wall with honey dripping out: Do you know what this reminds me of?
Nancy Bell: The Amityville Horror?
Me: Well, NOW it does.
(I later recanted, wishing that I had said Zombees from the start.)
After observing the situation from the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner, the southwest corner.... I finally told them I didn't think that the bees had stayed. I gave my reasons:
- No entrance. There are bees around the gutter, and other bees along the honey stain on the outside wall of the building. But as I mentioned before, with temperatures hovering around 95 degrees, there would be a beard of bees expected, and a high number of bees entering and exiting constantly from some location near the stain.
- Honey stain. The honey that was dripping from both inside and outside walls indicates that the bees are not caring for the hive. If bees were present in the hive, they would be working to regulate the temperature of the hive and to reinforce any breach of the honey resources.
- Dead bees. Dead bees in the upstairs indicated significant activity in the wall, with some access to the room. But the absence of live bees of any serious quantity (I only observed two inside the whole time we were there) indicates that the bees were no longer entering from the original location.
There are a bunch of reasons why a hive of bees would leave an established home - what we refer to as absconding. I explained it in terms of moving into an apartment complex: If you find out it is uncomfortable (temperature, disturbances, too crowded, poor ventilation, etc) you take whatever you can from the apartment and move. You can also have a problem with the queen, and the hive will abscond.
But mostly, we don't have any idea WHY they left. We just know that they did.
Once they left, the temperature inside the walls got high, the wax in the hive left behind began to deform, and honey began to leak from the comb. Meanwhile, with no bees there to protect their resources, the honey started to flow. It traveled down the wall from its original location, and pooled at the first location where a cross bar prevented further downward flow. At that point, the warm, less viscous honey exploited every crevice to flow out of the location.
Both inside and outside.
The problem, I explained, is now quite firmly not a beekeeper problem. But rather a how-do-we-get-the-honey-out-of-the-walls problem.
Brainstorming continued. A tongue-in-cheek suggestion was floated that we refer to it as a miraculous font ("Of Sister So-and-So") and charge donors $100 for a portion of the honey.
Finally, we agreed to the drilling of small holes at the ceiling line inside, to allow the honey to drain out from the walls, but with a straw (or plastic tube) inserted to direct the flow to a place where it could be collected. Instead of the way it was: dripping down the walls.
An hour later, I had several small holes, invisible from the ground level, and straws (which were VERY visible from the ground level) inserted. And no flow at all.
A few modifications later, I reported back to Stacey what I had done.
Me: So, do you want the two pieces of good news, or the one piece of bad news?
Stacey: There is good news? Give me that.
Me: Good news #1. I was right. There were no bees. That means when I drilled the hole in the wall, no horde of angry bees filled the entire auditorium. I guess that is more of a 'not bad news' than a truly 'good news' story, but I work with what I can.
Stacey:....
Me: Good news #2: There is not a huge quantity of honey in the walls. A full hive can have 100 pounds of honey - about 8 gallons (I think I actually said 12 gallons...). And with that much honey in the walls, you would have a spurt of honey when you opened a hole in the walls. And we didn't.
Stacey: That is good news, I guess.
Me: ...which leads to the bad news. The straws did not serve to divert the honey. There was not any build up inside the walls that I could find with the holes that I drilled. So what I did was to stuff paper towels in each crevice where honey was seeping out. The paper towels will eventually saturate, and will have to be replaced, but for the short term, you should be able to clean the floor and not have drips. At least for a few days.
I am headed back tomorrow to put the ladder back up, wipe everything down, and insert a dowel and some putty into the hole. But in the meantime, I will just pray for the soul of Sister So-and-So, and maybe find a market for the honey from her Zombees.
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