It’s July which means it is time for the annual trimming of the bushes. If you will recall last year this guy spent the time watching me sweat my ass off.
This year things got ugly.
Luckily this year the temperature was not so hot and I got a good start on the first day working the front of the house in the morning, in the shade. Over the course of the summer I had noticed bees entering and exiting through a hole that a chipmunk had opened up last year as an entrance to his underground villainous hideaway. I run the chipmunk off last year and covered the hole but he must have emailed the bees this spring and sublet it to them. So when I got to the front porch I decided it was time to run them off. My plan was to flood them out. Thinking that the underground lair wouldn’t have a real fancy drainage system I set the hose to trickle into the hole at just enough volume that all the water went into the hole and let that run for about 45 minutes.
At this point there were about 8 or 9 bees trying to figure out how to get into their secret hideout so I called in a drone wasp spray strike. Powerful stuff. Bee bodies everywhere. But off to the right I saw the ground moving and a bee head start to appear.
I stood there and watched this and as it emerged it looked different than the others.After it had flown away I realized it was probably the queen.
Crap, here I stood channeling that guy George W. Bush, I let Osama Bee Ladin get away. I left the bee carnage lay as a warning to any bees happening along that this was a war zone.
I then decided to take out the big ugly tree/bush tings that were growing up around the electrical boxes in the front yard. This turned out to be more difficult than expected and after an hour of sweating, sawing, pulling and hacking they were out. Hot and now time for lunch. I washed my hands, cleaned my face, used the toilet and generally tried to stop the profuse sweating by wiping down with the towel. Store this fact for future use.
I ate lunch and waited for the sun to get on the other side of the house and attacked the back yard. As I was trimming the last bush I nicked the electrical cord with the trimmer. Only the second time I had ever done this. So now I have 2 cut cords and not enough length with the 1 remaining cord to finish. So I decided I was done for the day. I moved everything into the garage, that had all doors open, only to be dive bombed by a bird. Apparently the bees had called in reinforcements. So I spent about 15 minutes trying to get the bird out of the garage, because, you know, they poop all over everything. The bird never went lower than any of the door openings. I mean how stupid can a bird be. If only there were some phrase that could be used here to describe the mental capacity of this birds brain. While chasing the bird around the garage I looked out and sitting at the garage door opening was a rabbit. Not only had the bees called in the air force they brought in ground troops. I gave up and sometime around dark the bird finally figured out how to leave and I closed up the garage.
The next day, Saturday, started by fixing the cords and finishing all the trimming and the starting the major task of a big trimming of the tree in the front corner of the rock wall area. Because of the wet year we have had all the trees have grown a lot. In fact a thousand years from now when the archeologists study the tree rings they will say “That year was a good growing year”. I got my long tree cutting device and completed that. Even the bugs were having a good year.
That morning when I checked on the bees I saw that they had again gained admittance to the underground lair. This time no fooling around with the water, I went straight to the drone strike and continued that the rest of the day. Now, 2 weeks later they appear to have been defeated.
With the mowing of the yard and general clean up the trimming was complete, except for one thing. But that thing got delayed. On Monday morning I woke up with my right eye almost swollen shut a rash all over my face, arms and hands. It seems that I had some kind of poison something and the online things suggested a doctor visit because of the various locations. So I spent the next week waiting for that to go away. Now 2 weeks later it is still on my arms to some degree. Remember the piece of data above I told you you would need later. My guess is that I had this poison ivy or whatever fuju juice on my hands that got on the towel that got on my face etc. I guess the bees also called in the plant kingdom as I’ve never had poison anything.
So yesterday I took on the last remaining part of this project. All summer I’ve been watching wasps go from the top of the deck to under the deck through the board crack between the second and third boards. I know what I was going to find and now that the bushes were trimmed and I could get near the underside of the deck that is what I did. I found the wasp death star. The front yard bees had sent a signal across the vastness of space and called in Wasp Vader.
My first thought was to attack this with my golf ball water hazard retriever but it was broken and just in the recon work that got the above picture I realized that being close to the death star was not a good idea. So I went with water by hooking the hose in the fence around the deck and locking it on I could shoot water without even being close. I did have to go recon after each trial to figure out the aiming. and to do this I had to get down on my hands and knees and look up about 2 feet away from the big death star which meant I was in the protection zone of the areal drones which at this point were pissed because of the water. I managed to get the water aimed correctly without being stung and went to war. This morning I surveyed the damage. The deck showed the results of some of the areal battle.
Investigating under the deck shows that the death star has been defeated and its drone pods wrecked.
So you can see that this year was a very difficult year for bush trimming. The thing is if it keeps raining it may have to be done again before winter.
The bright side of this is that it gives opportunity for a few bee music selections. First up is the great 60 surf music band the Ventures.
Man you can’t get better than that. Oh wait, yes you can. How about an 80’s hair band and an accordion.
Then there is the original recording of a song that has been covered by just about every blues and rock band. I’m a King Bee
And finally for those of you in the brass section of the band we got Harry James on trumpet. In fact I think this would be a good song for the marching band to use as it would get the show over quickly, less time for mistakes.
So, until next year just buzz off.
