After work yesterday, I was watching Abby and Berta play in the front yard when Berta noticed that there was a hole in the ground near the patch of dirt I turned over last year. I didn’t realize that such a small thing could lead to such a large front-yard mystery.
Last summer, a large patch of grass just went dead in the front yard. I thought that maybe the fertilizer or the neighbor’s dogs had something to do with it, so I dug up the patch, turned it over and re-seeded. Yesterday, on the edge of this patch (which is now only somewhat visible) there was a hole about the size of a quarter that seemed to go down for a few inches. After looking at it in wonder for a while, we noticed a bumble bee fly down to it and crawl inside. This can’t be good.
Well, I left it alone for a while, and then sent the girls into the back yard to play. Of course, they came back out front with Abby’s bike and start wheeling around on the sidewalk while I unwound the hose.
I stuffed the end of the open hose down into the hole and cranked on the water. If there was a bee’s nest down in there, I thought, surely I would soon fill the hole with water and be done with the bees. The water poured into the hole.
I’m not sure how long I let the hose run. Maybe five minute. There was no sign of the hole filling with water. Now, we’ve been getting rain all this week, so much that several places in nearby New Jersey had been evacuated due to dams breaking and sewage flooding. I considered that the ground was pretty well staurated. So where was all this water going?
A couple of bees started nosing around the outside of the hole, which was now plugged up with the hose. Bumble bees are pretty harmless, and they seemed more dumb and confused than anything.
I pulled the hose out of the hole and held it so the water was still pouring in. I think you can see from the pictures that it just does down the hole like a drain. Better than a drain, even, with no clogs from mud or anything. So I went and got the shovel.
When I came back, there were about eight bumble bees just kind of hovering around in the front yard. They looked like they were talking to each other, like, “Hey, my apartment’s flooded!” “Mine too!” “Strange weather, eh?” “Yup.”
I dug up the soil that contained the hole. At the bottom was a larger hole, maybe 4 inches in diameter. But there was no sign of any bee hive. So I dug up some more.
Something solid impeded the shovel. Aha! I thought. This must be it! When I cleared the dirt out of the way, it was clear that all I had found was a cinder block buried about a foot under the surface. Wait. A cinder block?
Home builders are notorious for leaving their garbage behind. When they build a house, they’ll just take their leftover materials and bury them in the front yard. There are people who have their houses built on what once was forest, where the builders bury the cleared tree in their front lawns, leaving quite an opportunity for sinkholes and termites.
I dug a little around the cinder block and found a bunch of bricks. A couple of bees dug their way out of the clay between them. This must be their lair!
Well, then Mr. Fell came ambling along and put up his typical neighborly fuss. I suppose he had a point about the bees being nocturnal and better dealt with at night with chemicals that will also kill my lawn. On the other hand, I never complain about his late-night construction and lawn mowing, or that his back yard is an excavated graveyard for RVs and as a result my yard is slowly falling into the giant hole he’s got back there. I guess when you dig up your front yard, you leave yourself open to comment, but I’m more concerned about a potentially recurring problem of bees in the yard and a possible sinkhole-like erosion of my property than a temporary state that leaves them flying about to sting the dogs that he leaves unrestrained to roam and pee all over my costly manicured lawn.
Nonetheless, I re-filled the hole.
Bees hovered in the air above the grass, looking fruitlessly for their home, while their underground buddies began the digging process. I went inside.
