Yesterday we had three more hives removed that had taken over our house and yard. This is the third time we’ve had to have bees removed, so we are becoming more and more comfortable around them. However, we want to remove the weird bathroom from the deck as well as a dead mango tree that had been taken over by vines and bees. Also, we would get bumped a few times by them and Britton had been stung on the neck, so we were finally ready to deal with the bees (again).

Bedroom hive, bathroom hive

We had thought about trying to take them out ourselves, but we just weren’t quite to that level yet. So we called up Enrique again and he came the same day! He said he would take two of the hives that were in the house, but not the one in the tree because they were fully African (all bees in the tropics now are somewhat Africanized but some are interbred with domestic honeybees). Those in the tree, he said, he would have to kill.

Monster tree covered in vines had the African bees

So we have now had a total of seven! huge hives removed from this property! I know they say that the bee population has been declining, but definitely not here on our wild property it seems. We would love to keep bees (somewhere other than in our living space) but we just are not to that point yet. I did ask Enrique if we could take back a hive some time in the future and he said yes. He said he has about 70 hives on his finca in Añasco! He also knows quite a lot about agriculture and we may use his services in that too!

There are quite a few lost bees still swirling around right now, but hopefully that won’t be too long and we can start on the next steps. In the mean time we are enjoying our literally home-made honey.

Because we are getting more and more comfortable (relative to the first time we found out there were bees in our house), we managed to video the process of Enrique taking out the hive this time and it is pretty fascinating (at least we thought so).

Enrique’s Spanish was a little difficult for me to understand, but I think I got the gist of it. I am still trying to pick up all the nuances of Puerto Rican Spanish because it is quite different from the Spanish spoken in Colorado. Britton doesn’t know the difference, but he is learning too! When Enrique warned him “No venga” Britton smartly asked me what that meant and now probably won’t forget that that means not to come close -especially when there are angry bees flying about. lol