'Bravo' Stars in a "BEE" Movie!!!

Over the past 4 or 5 days, Bravo has been involved in a seemingly insurmountable battle against a swarm of honey bees.  One morning, a few scouts came aboard, and evidently liked what they found.  The next morning there were a few more, and then more, and more still.  Now, your trusty 'Bravo' team has nothing against bees, per se.  In fact, Adam used to have a few hives of his own.

Adam zaps a few of the early scouts.

But when we're waking up to 10-20 in the cabin, things have gone too far!!!

"Houston, we've got a problem!!!"

We borrowed a pail of shredded coconuts from the marina, and lit it with a torch to smoke the lil demons out.  This seemed to have the desired effect.  Success!!!   Ummmmm.....not so fast!!!

We looked outside, and they had swarmed to the aft rail, around a fender and the GPS antennas.  Their queen must have been there, and the gang was rallying to her defense!  There were hundreds if not thousands of the little buggers.

Things were looking pretty grim aboard the good ship, until Dena, a "bee whisperer" and fellow cruiser from the boat Talaria heard of our plight.  It seems Dena's family used to be commercial bee keepers, and as a girl, she put in many an hour dealing with swarms.  She jumped into the fray like a real trooper, trying to sweep the rascals into a bucket.  Bare handed, I might add.  This girl has cajones!!!

Well, 'plan A' didn't work out too well.  Several bee stings later, it was time to bring out the big guns.  After dark, when the bees were catching a few zzzzz's, we fired up 'Bravo's' shop vacuum, and went deep!!!  Sucked literally a couple of pounds of bees into the vac, and bundled the whole thing into a garbage bag.




The next day, they were back.  We vacuumed up more with a friends vac, and added a bit of Raid to the garbage sacks, to hasten the passage of the pesky beasts to the happy hive in the sky.

Took a few more days till they got the message, but happily, for today, 'Bravo' is a bee free zone!!!  Hopefully this story will need no update!!!   Case closed!!!