Good Neighbors

Josh's parents were in the backyard with Riley this past weekend, enjoying the sunshine and chatting it up with our neighbors, when all of a sudden everyone heard a loud buzzing. As though someone nearby was working on a home improvement project. But then they all looked up, and were shocked by what they saw.

Bees. Hundreds of bees.



Josh's parents quickly took Riley inside and called us to the kitchen window to check things out. Never in my life have I seen so many in one place. And that one place was our backyard.

Upon further investigation we all spotted a new nest on the branch of a tree than hung over the yard. And if I thought I'd seen a ton of bees flying about in the air, it was nothing in comparison to this branch. I think teeming is an appropriate word. Perfect.

And what in the world do you do in this situation?

I mean, we're in a rental house and the tree was technically on city property. They came out of nowhere and we hadn't the first clue what to do. I certainly wasn't going to volunteer to climb up that tree and cut the branch down.

However, before we could even start to wonder, our new neighbors were on the phone. We didn't know exactly what they had in mind, but were thankful they were investigating options. When we returned back to the house later that day we found a note taped to the door. They'd actually called a beekeeper friend and he'd brought a special box to collect them all. He apparently did his beekeeping thing and coerced them all into the box, because later that night the box was gone and we haven't seen another bee since.

How nice of our new neighbors to literally take care of the whole situation! In like, 6 hours. We're really thankful.

As it turns out our buzzing friends were actually honey bees. And the beekeeper friend of our neighbors was thankful to get them, having lost a bee herd (I don't actually think herd is the word I want to use there) earlier this year.

And these sweet people even gave us a jar of homemade honey.