[TCK]The worst day of my entire life was the day Melissa (which means honey bee) came home and told me that one of her hives had totally gone rogue, and she (who is allergic to bees) had been stung several times (she is not yet fatally allergic- it is progressive as I understand it).
One of those opportunities I suppose to make her swoon and go figure out how to find the bad queen and dispatch it I suppose- How hard could it be?
Plan A was to simply find her and remove her so they would make another...this did not go well. I opened the hive and was immediately attacked by thousands of bees. So many that I ran off through a hedge screaming. The hedge brushed most of them off but they chased me over 500' (normally they are good for about 15').
This was going to be tougher than I had anticipated. Plan B- Get all the bees out of the boxes, build a new hive with their eggs and stores and have them return without the flightless queen.
This took a LONG time. I moved all the boxes of the hive about 30' feet away and began brushing all the bees in them carefully on to the ground. OF course they were enraged...Then I would carefully recreate a hive in the original location as they began to return. This took all day...and there were other episodes of running and screaming. At the end of the day I had four piles of angry bees steadily streaming back into the hive.
They subsequently created a new, kinder queen and in about 3 weeks, you could work the hive in your undies if you wanted to. Does not change the fifteen stings I got through my space suit that day. Does not explain why my wife would take up a hobby like keeping sometimes angry insects as pets...
At the end of the day the bees had covered me with so much pheromone that they were chasing me even further than the first round and through the hedges, so I peeled off my space suit and just left it in the parking lot (the bees are at her work) and left it there. I stood for a moment in my underwear wondering what I had gotten myself into, and then drove home sore and tired.
And people say she is a saint...
Guess I ought to play the song. [/TCK]