Bees

Where do carpenter bees go when they get the munchies?  Well…My house!  They sneak into the space between the aluminum clad fascia boards of the gable ends of the roof and the vinyl siding and they bore into the beams.  Or they chew on the unpainted beams of my porch roof.  Actually they don’t do it to eat the wood, they do it to make a home for their little, baby carpenter bees.  But the effect is the same as if they were ‘eating’ the wood.  There is sawdust all over the place and their dribbly spit mixed with the sawdust from their chewing is all over the siding and the railings and the deck.  It is a mess.  And it is not too good for the house either. 

Over the years I have pretty much ignored all this chewing up of my house.  Every once in a while (when I see a little pile of sawdust on the deck or under the gable end of the roof) I would climb up and find the hole and plug it up with a little bit of aluminum foil.  Before I would put the plug of Reynolds’s Wrap into the neat, 3/8” hole, I would bang on the affected area just to make sure I wasn’t trapping one of the little suckers in the hole.  Then I would push a healthy plug of metal foil in and that was that.  But lately the sawdust piles have proliferated and I see swarms of the docile bees hovering over the roof and near the raw wood of my porch beams. 

Enough is enough, I said to myself, and I have instituted the “RSG Program of Carpenter Bee Banishment”.  I bought a power washer.  I bought foam “backer rod” (which is a material to fill large gaps prior to caulking).  I bought plenty of silicone caulk.  I have taken out my ladders and tools, and I have mounted an offensive equal to the effort brought forth on this date by the Allies in 1944.   It is my intent to clean, fill and paint every area that might be deemed “desirable” by a carpenter bee and I began to implement my plan today.  My team and I started on the low gable on the north end of the building.

I will not bore you, dear reader, with the details of the effort except to say that many, many trips were made up and down an extension ladder, much energy was spent diligently stuffing/caulking/wiping/moving ladder/ surrounded by a very pissed off swarm of giant yellow and black, hairy looking bees.  No need for more detail than that!  When I was done with the north elevation I sat for quite a while observing the bees from a perch on the rock wall below the area of the former bee residences.  I marveled at how persistently one of them strafed and hovered over the area that had, up until an hour ago, been the front door to the apartment complex he and his friends had under construction in the end beam of my roof.  In fact I marveled that a creature so ungainly in appearance could fly at all.  It seemed to defy the laws of aerodynamics.  

After working next to the swarm for a couple of hours while I sealed the area it became obvious that they are very peaceful bees.  They’d come close and veer off, come back, veer off…etc.  More curious than aggressive.  I never worried about being stung.  The possibility of falling off the ladder was much more likely so I paid attention to my balance and position first, my work second and the bees a distant third.  I am still alive tonight.  The work got done.  The bees are homeless and pissed!

It was suggested by someone I discussed the “bee situation” with that I should just get some of that wasp stuff that shoots out of a can thirty feet high, and kill ‘em.  I rejected that as a possible solution.  It would have temporarily “solved” one problem but in the long run I would have also set in motion my own death.

You see, we must co-exist, the bees and I, for one very important reason.  That is-I may kill a few of the bees or even all of the bees who are attempting to cohabit in my home,  But, and this is the most important consideration, the bees will eventually kill me.  Merely by no longer being there the bees will cause myself and all the humans I represent in this mini-drama to perish.  Who will pollinate my eggplant in my garden when the bees are gone?  In fact, Life with out honey…?  I would rather be dead.

So,  Let us bee-proof our homes.   Let us look on the Bee in wonder-at its industry and it's purpose.  Long live the Bees.

If It Ain’t Fixed, Don’t Broke It!

The postal service is a dinosaur.  It is a Brontosaurus sinking in a fiscal tar pit. Like a tortoise on its back in the desert sand it has been trying to right itself for decades.  Most of the stuff it brings to my mailbox is junk.  A shredder right next to the mailbox would be a blessing.  Just pop the majority of the day’s delivery directly into the jaws of machine, no need to carry it up the driveway and chop it up in the shredder in the dining room and wait for the paper collection day and bring it back down the driveway where it ends up in the maw of the garbage truck…

Coupon books from the auto parts store, announcements for the opening of a new Party City or Chinese restaurant menus-that’s the sort of stuff I would like to drop right into the new, conveniently located shredder.  I sort through the junk to find the one or two valid pieces of communication I get each week.  Similar to the percentage/number of actual important phone calls I get each week on our land-line phone.  The rest of the mail is a waste of my time, as are the phone calls for time shares, carpet cleaning services, flue cleaning services, electricity providers and scam artists from Zimbabwe and India.  No, I don’t want you to service my computer from your remote location in Sumatra and I don’t want your penny saver publication from Crugers/Montross.

Anyway, back to the postal service. 

It started as a great idea.  Ben Franklin started it and for two hundred years it held our nation together.  Letters and documents traveled by foot, by horse, by train, wagon, and truck for all that time and people depended on the postal service for personal communication and commerce.  But, like so many other inventions it has seen its utility pass and is now as useful as an infected appendix.  No one writes letters any more (with some exceptions, such as me) and important information is transmitted via e-mail, text messages, Facetime and Skype.  Most school kids would not know how to put a stamp on and address an envelope, for that matter they probably don’t even know where to buy stamps.  Handwriting skills have degenerated to uselessness and I am not sure if it is even a subject in the school system.  Any communication over 160 characters would similarly be a mystery to anyone under the age of thirty-five.  So, of what use is a service whose sole purpose is to transport and deliver written material when written material is extinct?  Answer: None!

It will not be easy to put an end to a service that is integral to the concept of our nationhood and as ubiquitous as the Lincoln head cent.  Who is strong enough to pose the proposition that we should get rid of all the white, red and blue emblazoned delivery trucks, the little hand carts with the canvas sacks full of envelopes, and the letter carrier with his/her powder blue shirt and Bermuda shorts, and where in the world did the safari hat come from?  Merely suggesting the Postal Service curtail Saturday delivery to staunch the fiscal bloodletting caused an outcry in congress and the population.  And I will admit I am torn as well by the thought that there will be no more government delivered mail coming to my house but, I also miss the rotary dial telephone, three speed on the column, and free TV but nothing is forever.  

It is time to recognize the direction of our civilization.  That is, we require world class, fast and affordable internet-universally available to everyone and regulated in the same manner that any vital utility is regulated-not subject to the greed and whim of money- grubbing conglomerates (read “Time Warner/Comcast/Verizon).  We do not need government bureaucracy delivering shoes from Amazon-there are plenty of private companies who do this very well already!  We do need educational systems which include art, physical education, nutrition and health education as well as the traditional three R’s.  Why do I bring this up while discussing the postal system?  Because the postal system of the United States is only part of the joke shared by the rest of the world.  We are becoming a nation of test takers, wasters and fall-behinders!  We squander our resources on old technology when we support the P.O. and ignore the health and education of our population.  We support the P.O. and accept our faulty digital infrastructure (or worse, leave it to the back-room antics of the monopolies and politicians who keep it slow and make it expensive).  We ignore the bridges and roads we need to maintain our society but build drones and billion dollar planes and trillion dollar armies.  We have an obligation to ourselves to have the best educational system, medical delivery system, healthy people and clean water and…Oh, my God!  There are so many things that are more important than propping up the United States Postal Service!  Just let it go.