I'm tired of living with bees.

When I first moved into the apartment on my property (the pool house), there was a hive in the wall facing the pool. Apparently it had been there for close to a year. I didn't really mind it. It was weird hearing a hum through the walls, but I figured that because it was behind the plastic shower/bath combo I didn't have anything to worry about. And because it didn't pose a direct threat to my clients, my company didn't really care to address it.

Then half of the hive broke off and colonized the space between the ceiling and the old shingles. I started seeing one or two inside my apartment every night, probably following the light. So I taped up the wall heater, which is beneath the portion of the ceiling they had swarmed to, and I taped up most of the outlets they could have access to. I begged my company to take care of it. I called a bee guy to get a quote, and he tried to start a web design company with me -- the bee removal industry is 100% SEO and salesmanship and he mastered them. But my company wouldn't pay to have the bees removed.

Finally, I begged the woman who owns the property we lease. She called a friend of hers who has a small bee farm. He was an old decrepit Romanian dude who didn't speak a lick of English, but a few days later he had it all taken care of. I'm not sure how he transported the box that had them all, because he drives a van. I didn't even see him leave with them.

A few weeks later, another swarm appeared above my front porch and inhabited a crack under the roof paneling. The hive has continually grown the past few weeks, and I've had no traction with the property owner or my company to have them removed. It's grown to the point that there are bee icicles hanging down from their entrance point. Not all of them can fit in there, so they cling to one another on the outside at night.

My front door is a sliding glass door that lets a lot of light out at night. For the past few weeks, 1-3 bees have been finding their way inside by crawling through the spaces between the slider trough and promptly start flying into my ceiling light like nocturnal insects. I try to kill them before my cat gets a hold of them and eats them. If they don't crawl through the bottom of the door, they sit on the outside of it or right at the point where the door closes and fly in whenever I open it. I've walked outside barefoot for a cigarette and been stung on the bottom of my foot from stepping on a bee twice. I didn't learn my lesson the first time.

So now I spend my nights in near darkness. I've been forced to candlelight. I don't want to hang out in my bathroom or closet all night just for electrical lighting.

Bees have effectively pushed my lifestyle 100 years into the past.