First, find a Bumblebee nest in your barn. I stumbled across one while I was moving bales of straw & alfalfa from one side of the barn to the new storage area I had built for just such a purpose (storing hay & straw, thus freeing up an extra stall I needed.)
The first clue that there was a Bumblebee nest was when I had moved the last bale and suddenly noticed there was about a thousand, million bees buzzing about. “Gee, where did they come from? I wondered to myself.” My second thought was “Gee, I’m sure glad they’re not stinging the shit outta me!” The fact that they weren’t stinging the shit outta me clued me in to the fact that they were not A: yellow jackets, or B: honey bees. And these were BIG bees. Super Bees. I concluded that they must be some form of Bumblebees, which are great pollinators. The males don’t have stingers, and as such; are welcome in my garden and orchard anytime.
But keeping in mind that there were a thousand, million of these bees keeping a nest in my barn, I hit the Internet. I wanted to know exactly what sort of bees these were. After hours of fruitless searching (Thanks Jeeves, NOT!), I finally found a site that had pictures of my precious Bumblebees. bombus And that site assured me that they Do Not Have Stingers.
With that knowledge in tow (and a leap of faith in the Internet), I ventured down to the barn. I garnered a pitchfork, and used it to pry up the Bumblebee nest more or less intact. Now, the Bumbles took umbrage at this, and buzzed up a storm while I was prying the pitchfork into their nest. They continued to buzz me, and covered my head like a bride’s veil. Once I had wrested the nest from its hallowed grounds, the thousand, million bees followed me. And that was OK, because none of them stung me. HAH! you stinger-less bees! I re-located their nest to the south side of the barn, where they seem to be quite happy. And I promptly ran into the house, and took a long, hot bath to rid me of the feeling that a thousand, million bees were climbing all over me. GAH!
When I would torment bumblebees as youngster by capturing them in cricket cages and giving them marigold flowers to “eat”, I got the crap stung out of me numerous times. Where did you ever get the idea that bumble bees were “stingless”?
astro, I’m sorry you got stung as a child. So did I! But through research, we have learned that Bumblebee males don’t have stingers. The bees you and I ‘played with’ as children may have been honey-bees. Or they may have been flies (which we may have wrongly percieved as being bees), many of which ‘sting’.
My family used to have one or two horses at one point in time or another. We don’t have any at the moment, and will likely never have another. (I really miss Minnie. I never rode her, but enjoyed having conversations with her whenever I’d happen to feed her.) Our barn is at least 25 feet high. The front half has three stalls, and above that is a loft that opens up onto the rear half, which is open from floor to peaked roof.
One year when I was a kid, while we began bringing in the bales of hay, we discovered a nest in the peak of the roof against the back wall of the barn. I can’t quite remember if it was a bee or wasp nest, but whatever they were, they were the stinging kind. I’m tempted to say they were wasps. We hadn’t done much, and they were already pretty pissed off. But we had work to do, and beer to drink afterwards.
To make a rather short story that I’ve turned rather long short, my father got out his shotgun and blew it away. The nest was completely destroyed, and we had a nice star-like pattern in the corner of the roof. There was no sign of any wasps flying around, but we did find a few in the hay on the floor, wiggling about, dazed and incapacitated. We just had to watch where we put our hands as we stacked the bales of hay.
