...should have listened to the bees....

.”…picture-perfect memories…..” -- memories are like little windows-in-time -- when you open one up, you never know what you are going to find, that glimpse into who or what or where or when….happenings that you have forgotten or get to laugh out loud at again because of, or just think about in a different way ……

Looking out my office window I see the small tree atop the snow…. No, wait, that’s not a small tree, that is the Top of the tree sitting above the pile of snow. We have had so much snow of late that what we plow gets shoved up when it can go no further back…. That tree sits in the center of a flower bed, one where my daughter ran over a hornet’s nest this fall while mowing the lawn… a nest that had not been there the previous week…and a very active nest it was too, with lots of yellow jack’s going in and quickly exiting carrying sand bit in their excavation of the nest. I remember my father telling us years ago when I was a kid, that you could tell what kind of a winter it was going to be by watching the bees – how high did they build a hive in the tree, or how deep in the ground or protected wall did they go…the flower bed is a raised bed built into the side of the slope on the lawn, in full sun the greater part of the day…..and this is where they chose to stay for the winter. This was not acceptable to us so close to the house, especially as there is a fair amount of traffic (us and the dogs and cat, on our way down to the garage) going beside it, so out came the bee spray late in the day when the majority if not all were back. Hubby sprayed all the way around the raised bed so that the bees would not decide to simply move the nest elsewhere in the flower bed (I usually am the one to putter and pluck weeds in this one)…..Yup, missed a few bees, cause a week later daughter almost ran over a nest some 20 feet away by a rock edging the property line…think we got them all this time…we’ll see come the spring if we didn’t….

Don’t get me wrong…I don’t mind bees in general, so long as they stay where they should. Had it been a nest of bumble bees, they could have stayed – yellow jack’s have a tendency to be downright ornery, mean, and nasty, and short-tempered…not a good neighbor (or houseguest if they find a hole in your foundation)….

I have heard that bees are supposed to be good luck, but not if you killed the bee…. hmmmm….some bee lore I found online: “if a bee enters your home, it’s a sign that you soon will have a visitor. If you kill the bee, you will have bad luck or the visitor will be unpleasant” – hmmm, don’t know if this holds true when the bee in question, the yellow jack, enters the house in daughter’s pants leg after stinging her……not good luck for daughter I am thinking, but there you go……