Friday, April 29, 2016

To bee or not to bee

How it is with selling a house is…you're constantly being asked to make an endless series of small but seemingly crucial decisions.  None of them necessarily feels heartbreakingly important on its own, but as a collective--an integral, as it were--they add up.

And the decisions never abate.  You make one; five more appear.  Since you're talking about, potentially, hundreds of thousands of dollars they all take a feeling of momentousness.  They none of them have clear and obvious answers.  In some ways, they all seem too insignificant to even bother with.  But then as soon as you start to bother with them, they threaten to drag you into insensibility.

The issue right now is our beehive.  We have a beehive in our backyard; it resides in a cavity in our biggest tree.  We like the bees.  They keep the flowers pollinated; they don't bother us (they sleep most of the day); and we basically support and approve of their existence.  Beehives, as probably a lot of you know, are dying all around the world--some kind of hive sickness no one fully understands--and so the thought of having our bees relocated (which we've considered once or twice) has never appealed to us.



Now, though, we're going to have strangers coming to our house (only two weeks away) to consider buying it.  The beehive is, we think (and our realtor agrees) a definite plus for buyers: bees are good for yards.  But, he suggests, there's a chance that one of our visitors might get stung while touring the house and sue us.  So maybe we ought to relocate it.

The beehive was there when we bought the house.  It dates back to the previous owner, the woman who bought the house in 1950.  We don't want to get rid of the beehive.  But maybe we should.  Who knows.  It's just one of the millions of picayune choices facing one buying a house.  Like bees they swarm around you.  They don't seem like they will sting--but you never know.

3 comments:

Dezmond said...

Perhaps give them notice (the people, not the bees. But I guess you could also tell the bees that guests will be there). Not like "you might be stung", but explain the beehive as a cool positive. I guess the only problem that could arise is they don't like that potential buyer and decide to swarm them, or you get someone with a bee sting allergy. But then you might traumatize the bees with relocation and contribute to our bee crisis by inadvertently killing the bees. And who knows, one of your bees could be the bee who discovers the solution to the worldwide problem.

You're right. These are hard decisions. Glad I don't have to make them.

JMW said...

I hope Macaulay Culkin doesn't come to look at the house.

Also, I would have gotten rid of that beehive on Day 1. Oh, that beehive would be so gone.

Cartooniste said...

Someone could also slip and fall in your foyer and sue you. Life is full of risks. Not everything is within our control.

The beehive stays.

And my sympathies to you both, as we are in the same boat, except that no one with an ounce of sense wants to move to Green Acres. Unless you do? Do you want to buy our house in Green Acres?