Last week I tweeted that my neighbor discovered she had a hive with an estimated 80k bees in her house. Today the beekeeper is here trying to relocate the bees. So of course in between meetings I’m trying to watch what’s goin down.

I should do a shitty MS paint drawing for y’all but. I can’t see them actually working because the entrance to the hive is by her exterior AC unit which is on the far side of her house away from ours. If I stand in the bay window of my partner’s office I can see her driveway.

There is no way in hell im going out there. I do not have enough epi pens or auvi-q autoinjectors for that. So far: one hour of a pickup truck in the driveway and a slow methodical set up. Now he’s suited up and presumably wooing them with music and pollen and concert tix.

When we informed our teenager about all this - because his allergic reaction is just a hair less spectacular than mine - he blurted “How the fuck do you not notice 80,000 bees?!” And then like a good wannabe engineer ran some calculations.

At 80k bees, the hive itself probably contains between 50-60 pounds of honeycomb. 4000 bees weigh 1 pound, so it's 70-80 pounds of honeycomb and bees.

There are approximately 3900 established (ie, not wild) honey bee colonies in Kansas. Colonies range from 10K-60K bees per. So using 35K as the average number, that's 136,500,000 honey bees in KS that are managed by beekeepers.

Our neighbor has the equivalent of 0.06% of our state's managed honey bee population IN HER FUCKING HOUSE (please note the technical terminology yelled by the teenager)

There was - and is now gone - a bunch of gear on the driveway. A box which looked remarkably like a Cajon, a box drum, which made me think of the Silk Road Ensemble's portion of the Yo-yo Ma tribute at Kennedy Center Honors

The assistant - who is, I might add, wearing ZEEEERO protective gear & you can tell me all you want honey bees only sting defensively she'll be ok but dude I would be super aggro if I was being rousted from my lovingly built wax & honey palace- was toting giant plastic bags.

You know the kind, the ones you shove your off-season clothes in & then they smell weird 6 months later when you're like 'shit I need a sweater' & dig it out of the closet. Flannels. Blankets. Thousands of honeybees in a bag. Sure, why not, seems like a great storage choice.

So 1 thing I had noticed but not processed was that today's vehicle was different - I figured they'd just brought the big truck for Bee Haulin in Bags or Whatever. PLOT TWIST: it's a different beekeeper. A COMPETING beekeeper. Dude #1 apparently was OH HELL NO and wouldn't deal.

Beekeeper 2, Electric Boogaloo is of the opinion that bitch please, there are not 80k bees in there. But he can't get to the bees to get them out. So there's an Indeterminate Number Of Unreachable Bees, which sounds like a profoundly shitty art house film or concept album.

But now because their Bee Paradise has been disturbed by BK2 cutting holes in the side of the house and the first floor trying (and failing) to get to them, the bees are pissed off (SEE I WAS RIGHT SHE SHOULD HAVE WORN PROTECTIVE GEAR). Why are the bees pissed off, biologically?

SO GLAD YOU ASKED REMEMBER Y'ALL I'M A BIOLOGIST WHO MAKES THEME PARKS AND MUSEUMS NOW. Bees, like many other insects, as well as mammals, release pheromones to signal to other individuals.

Pheromones are chemicals these critters produce and release into the environment to affect the behavior or physiology of other species members. Bees use pheromones a lot, they're fascinating.

Foraging bees, for instance, produce worker pheromones- which literally suppress the maturation of nurse bees into forager bees, in order to keep the ratios right for a healthy colony. That's an example of a pheromone that affects the physiology of another individual.

If a bee confronts a threat OR is forced to sting something, it releases the alarm pheromone. It rouses the other bees to take up arms, as it were, and defend the hive.

So the real shitty news in all of this is, while it would appear that possibly there were not in fact 80,000 bees in my neighbor's house, there were plenty to be one hell of a threat, the 2nd beekeeper couldn't reach them, and in fact effectively pissed them right the fuck off.

He can't just leave An Indeterminate Number of Angry Bees in her house, so he has sprayed. Please play a tiny round of taps for the bees. Possibly on a Cajon. BUT. This is not immediately effective. There are tons of bees NOT in the hive who expect to be able to get back in.

And you know, from a biological perspective, what's wafting on the breeze like you're high-tailing it past the perfume counter at a department store (remember those? From the Before Times?)

Alarm pheromone.

And so this, my friends, is how Cyn and her teen got trapped in her house because An Indeterminant Number Of Bees Hopped Up On Alarm Pheromone Are Flying Around Spoiling For A Fight (shitty film concept). We're told they should be dead or have flown off to a new home by tomorrow.

BK2 shot foam into the holes, so that the bees in the hive couldn't get out. I didn't have the heart to point out to my neighbor this means she's going to have a decaying biomass of bees and...well however much honey they made... in her floor.