Jim and I woke up to the beautiful sound of rain outside of our window on Saturday. We were somewhat confused when we looked out and there was no sign of a rain cloud anywhere. Confusion turned to dread when we put our ears up to our bedroom wall and noticed that below the sound of "rain" there was a faint but distinct buzzing sound. Eeeks! There were bees in our wall!!! Ugh.

The exterminator came out on Sat. and said that a few bees (by the sound in our wall, there HAS to be more than a few!) made their nest in our wall through a small crack in one of our bricks. Hearing all their little feet moving and the buzzing is one of the worst sounds I've ever heard. It's giving me the heebee geebees just writing about it. Jim kept on saying, "Why are you freaking out? It's not like they can get into our house." To which I replied, "You've never seen a Hitchcock movie then. Because THEY always find a way in!"

Interesting Bee Facts:

- Bees do not create honey; they are actually improving upon a plant product, nectar. The honey we eat is nectar that bees have repeatedly regurgitated and dehydrated.

- The average American consumes a little over one pound of honey a year. In the course of her lifetime, a worker bee will produce 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.

- A productive hive can make and store up to two pounds of honey a day. Thirty-five pounds of honey provides enough energy for a small colony to survive the winter. (oh jeez!)

- During the mating flight several drones will deposit upwards of 90 million sperm in the queen's oviducts. The queen, however, will not use all the sperm. She stores about seven million sperm in a special pouch, the spermatheca. (hah!)

- In one day a queen can lay her weight in eggs. She will lay one egg per minute, day and night, for a total of 1,500 eggs over a 24-hour period and 200,000 eggs in a year. Should she stop her frantic egg-laying pace, her workers will move a recently laid egg into a queen cell to produce her replacement. (Oh crapola!)


- While workers select which fertilized eggs to brood in queen or worker cells, the queen decides the sex of her young. In a mechanism of sex determination known as haplodiploidy, fertilized eggs will become female offspring, while unfertilized eggs will become males