I am having problems with both birds and bees.<\/p>\n
First, the birds: My peaches are ripening on the tree in my back yard, and there are lots of bites and nibbles. The worst part is that birds will eat them at a greener state than I will, so they spoil them before they are ripe enough for me.<\/p>\n
I put up a net over the tree, but birds, with their excellent eyesight, can find any little hole in the net to get in. Unfortunately, once they get in under the net they aren’t nearly as good at finding the hole again to get out. So each morning I get up to find 2-3 birds stuck inside the net, sometimes with feathers tangled up in the mesh. I have to raise up one side of the net and then chase them out. At least 2-3 birds a day don’t eat as many peaches as however many were getting to them before, but I’m selfish and want them all to myself. Little by little I’ll find and patch those holes.<\/p>\n
You remember a couple of weeks ago that I had bees in my garage. I called a bee expert who came and judged that they were just scouting and would probably move on. I vacuumed them up and he fixed a few holes, and that was that.<\/p>\n
Yesterday we noticed hundreds of bees again, near where they had been before, but in an area untouched by the bee man. The stucco wall extends out slightly from the foundation, and there are little holes on the bottom, presumably to let any water out that may get in. The bees were going in and out of one of those holes as if they lived there. So I set up the vacuum cleaner hose an inch or so away from the bee-hole and just let it run. It was fascinating to sit and watch as bee after bee got too close and disappeared with a “thwip”, sometimes several in a second. It didn’t take long (an hour, maybe) until there were very few bees left buzzing around outside. The inside of the vacuum had hundreds–maybe a thousand bees.<\/p>\n
The beauty of the vacuum method of bee removal is that when a bee is stressed or injured, it secretes a pheromone that excites other bees and incites them to attack. But with the vacuum, the bee and any pheromones are immediately removed from the area before they know anything is amiss. The other bees never realize that anything is wrong, though I’m sure eventually they are bothered by all their sisters gone missing. They hive must become a lonely place, like an old Twilight Zone episode where all the people suddenly disappear from the earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am having problems with both birds and bees. First, the birds: My peaches are ripening on the tree in my back yard, and there are lots of bites and nibbles. The worst part is that birds will eat them at a greener state than I will, so they spoil them before they are ripe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-updates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}