The Mansion Is Under Surveillance

I opened the basement door this afternoon to dump the dehumidifier bucket. You remember my dehumidifier, don't you? D'Hummi? That's his name. Don't wear it out. He has to be emptied twice a day, our dear D'Hummi. The chore usually falls to The Pony, but I have been Poniless since Friday. So D'Hummi duty has fallen on me.

Just outside the door, scarcely six inches from the threshold, was this creature:

That's not the actual creature, because I did not have my phone camera with me. No reception in my netherworld, so I leave it upstairs on the kitchen counter. And since I didn't have my regular runner, The Pony, (come on, try to keep up) to fetch it for me, I used my best friend Google for the image.

That's a wood bee. An eastern carpenter bee if you want to get all specific. This one appears to be male, evidenced by the white face. Mine was female. She looked up at me with her five eyes, daring me to do something. I stepped over her, dumped D'Hummi's drippings, and edged back inside. Then slammed the door in her face. Because we're already at war with the McCoy hounds, and we don't need another battle.

Besides, the basement door is metal. And the walls are concrete. Ms. Wood Be should be more interested in the pool deck and back porch. We've already eradicated her ancestors out by the garage. They made a home, palatial, I might add, in a 4 x 4 cedar post that holds up the porch roof. And the hole they used for their portal looked just like that one in the photo. You'd think they used a compass to draw it before chomping their way in. Precise little engineers, those wood bees.

At first I thought she was a bumble bee. Then, from the back, she looked like a big beetle with shiny wings. But I saw the fuzzy yellow again from the front. I could have trod on her and put an end to her surveillance of my underground fortress. But I was not feeling especially bloodthirsty today.

I'm saving my rage for the wasps under the eaves.