Fellow Travellers

We have a camera mounted on the wall above the front door so that we get alerts on our phones when a package is delivered and when someone knocks on the door. Well, to be honest, it's an alert on my husband's phone, because frankly, I don't care. If there's a package coming, I already know about it and are probably checking the Amazon listing every fifteen minutes to see if it's been delivered yet. If there's a knock on the door, we won't answer it because we know it's a solicitor; we never have anyone come over, and if we did, we'd know about it beforehand, so any unexpected knock is nothing we want to interact with. However, my husband likes to know about anything going on out there. I'm quite happy to not get extra useless notifications.

But I digress.

Interestingly, no one ever notices the camera. It's up in the corner above the door, quite above anyone's head but not hidden in any way, and when it detects motion and it starts recording, a blue light on its face turns on. I guess people haven't quite realized that door cameras are now very common, so they don't look for them. Yet.

Now that it's spring, though, my husband has been getting tons of notifications of motion detection from that camera. We get year-round visits from the neighborhood cats (they are adorable; we have tons of clips of cats wandering up, scratching on the welcome mat, and often curling up and going to sleep on it) and the occasional fly-by by a bird. We got a bat for the first time a few nights ago, and we once saw a waddling blob that we could only guess was a nutria. But, with spring, the vast majority of interruptions are bees.

It's not a constant thing, mind you. We were getting probably five to ten notifications a day, usually clumped together in a fifteen-minute period. Thing is, my husband is deathly afraid of bees. Well, mostly deathly afraid of wasps, hornets, and yellowjackets, but he'll still also panic at bees. So, of course, he wanted to get rid of them.

He thought that the appearance of the bees meant that there was a hive behind the camera or in the hole above it where the two walls meet the awning. I didn't think so, because if there was a hive, we'd be getting constant motion detections, not just a few. But he wanted to kill it, so we sprayed poison into the hole a couple of times, and of course, nothing really changed.

Then he actually did some research and discovered that to detect motion, the camera emits IR, which bees can see and think is a flower. Thus, they approach the camera as bees do, flying in and out trying to figure out what's going on and triggering the camera repeatedly. The best thing to do in this case is to get bee repellent.

So, we ordered a bottle of bee repellent from Amazon. It's non-toxic, a mix of essences from various plants that has a smell that bees don't like. Luckily, it actually smells rather nice. The instructions were what you'd expect: saturate the area well with the spray the first time, then follow it up every couple days to keep the aroma steady. That's what we did, and it worked nicely, no bee notifications for the next two days.

Then, as it happens with Amazon sellers, I received an email from the retailer with instructions on how to use the repellent and a note to please be sure to contact them if I had any questions. Okay, that's odd, as the bottle already has instructions on it, but that's nice customer service at least. Then I read the email's instructions, which started like this:

On the first day, be sure to spray the whole area liberally to show the bees you mean business.

And that's now my husband's mantra. He has stepped outside with the bottle and yelled, "I mean business!" as he sprayed. He has gotten up from his desk and said to me, "I am going to show them I mean business," before going downstairs to spray. He has casually commented to me in the middle of conversations, "You know, I mean business."

So, I guess, if you're a bee, now you know to stay away from our front door, because my husband means business.