And if cats were not enough...

Last week a colony of bees swarmed over our building and took up residence in one of the holes in the church facade across the street. When they built these churches the masons would stick wooden beams into the wall and lay planks across them to serve as scaffolding. When they got done at that height they'd move the scaffolding up to a higher level. Thing is, you can't get back and fill in the holes once you are done. So the facades have these holes all over them. Particularly the brick unfinished facades.

Lots of these churches were started and then they ran out of money before they could put the marble facing on the front of them. So the churches remain unfinished with indented brick fronts where the marble would have attached had they had the money to complete it. This happened a lot... even the fancy churches in Florence were unfinished for hundreds of years. They were only finished when the Italian capital was relocated to Florence in the late 1800s. They decided that the capital city couldn't have all these unfinished churches sitting around.

The funny thing is that this stands in sharp contrast to the palazzos in Venice. There the families were building houses to impress their friends and neighbors so the facades along the Grand Canal were the first things to go up... and *then* they ran out of money and couldn't finish the interiors. The Peggy Gugenheim museum in Venice is in a one-story stone building on the Grand Canal... the first floor of a palazzo that was never finished. This isn't just true in Venice either. Many of the Palladio palazzo for which he is justifiably famous were never finished on the interior.

Anyhow, back to the bees. They decided that they were not happy with the church I guess, and formed a huge swarm under the eaves of the palazzo we have school in. There was this huge ball of buzzing bees over there... about a foot and a half across. The fire department brought a ladder over the other day and they smoked the bees and scooped them up (using a kitchen ladle no less) and put them into a hive box. It is unclear at the moment whether or not they got the queen bee. They left the box for as many of the workers to collect in as they could but yesterday it looked like they might have moved back into the church. But I guess the bee-guy came back today, collected the hive box and said that he thought it had worked. I'm sure he knows. He estimated 60,000 bees. Just so long as they don't end up in our wall along with the cat...

- B -