“It fell down,” he said. I was dismayed. An

“It fell down,” he said.

I was dismayed. An old barn is one thing, but a white, freshlypainted farmhouse is another. Why had these insects picked on me? The house stands in the middle of a large, open field, so I suppose a bee looking for a nesting site just couldn’t miss it. The female drilling into the kitchen window was only a forerunner. Others followed, some black, some with yellow fur, but all homing-in on the house, torpedo-shaped with evil intent in every zigzag movement.

I no longer had any soft spot for bees. Sherlock Holmes himself would have classed them as outright criminals, more dangerous than his famous archenemy, professor Moriati. He never would have accepted the view of the expert that there was “nothing much you can do about them.”

I did a quick survey of the property. Sure enough, there w'ere holes under the planks of the verandah, and holes under the flooring of the front porch. I could hear buzzing in the woodwork, coming from those long corridors and side chambers. Each entrance was a precise 3/8-inch drill hole, just like the one in the kitchen window frame, and falling sawdust was coming out of the holes to show that work was still afoot inside.

I turned from scientist to my country neighbors for advice. A fellow customer at the Farmers’ Cooperative told me to seal up the hole with mud, and that would be an end of the problem. Apparently, from what he knew' about the bees, they can eat their way in, but they can’t eat their way out.

I was grateful for his suggestion but, to Julia and me, it didn't seem to be quite the thing to do. Smearing mud on an old barn might be all right, but not mud on our house.

When I looked at the holes again, the problem gave its own solution. There was one fatal weakness in the habits of the swarm.

Each bee made exactly the same size of hole, and they were all per