Almost
a month later, and I'm still working on the bees (that originally
showed up in a tree more than a year ago).
As the humane approach, I've avoided any kind of insecticide, after all there are a lot of bee deaths out here in California as humans encroach upon their habitat. And we really need them to pollinate the plants, like all of that fruit that grows in the valleys to the south of us... Got a nation to feed, after all.
What I
have done is stuff plastic bags into the holes at the base of the olive tree. A few years ago, I had tried the expanding foam thing, you know, the kind of stuff you can buy at the hardware store to "seal" up the cracks around your door moldings, etc. To keep energy costs in check... Bees just love this stuff, after it drys and hardens, they just eat right through it, sort of like ants and their tunnels.
So this year, I've tried the plastic bag trick, but I have to do this in the early a.m., when I can see by daylight, and the bees are still cold and not moving around. Evening, well... let's just say, I'm too tired to do much after about 8pm...
My results are mixed, in that the bags have a natural sort of expanding mechanism that on their own must be tied to some kind of mechanical property of the plastic itself, you know, sort of like those "memory" metals that remember their shape. I'm not saying that the bag wants to be a "bag" again, only that it doesn't want to be a "hole plugger". Anyway, give the bees an inch, in that the bag expands out a little, and those little industrious bees, they push like heck until they find a little opening, and BAMM! they are
Free!
I'll keep you posted.
**** Update: I really jammed the plastic in the hole, it's staying. That's the good news... The bad news- they have found a crack higher in the tree trunk for ingress/egress...
simply don't believe this is safe. Our own situation is a little tricky, in that we have our own well, and we do our own R.O. filtration for the main tap where we usually drink from. But this "lots of people" quote comes from a recent article on Skepticality regarding this very topic.
