Homeowners Abuzz About Attic
It looked, said one hapless resident, like “something out of a Hitchcock movie.” When Robin Scott and her mother, Naomi, called in an extermination service to get rid of the bees stirred up during remodeling on their attic, they expected to uncover a hive “the size of a pickle jar.” But, instead, when exterminators tore out the attic wall in their Boston home, they found a 4-by-8-foot honeycomb, dripping with about 500 pounds of honey and 100,000 bees. “I couldn’t believe what we saw when we opened the wall,” said Dale Wilson, co-owner of the Bee & Wasp Removal Service of Bedford. “This is the largest hive I’ve ever seen and the oldest, too--at least 30 years old. I was amazed.” Exterminators used “bee vacuums” to collect the insects from behind the “softly humming” wall. “It was a real horror show,” Robin Scott said. The hive might never have been discovered, Naomi Scott said, had they not decided last month to place vinyl siding on the 100-year-old clapboard house and convert the attic into an apartment.
--When Tim DeMatteis hauled up a heavy catch while fishing the Flint River in Ontario, Canada, he was hoping for a large trout. Instead, an incredulous DeMatteis found that he had snagged his father’s moss-covered knapsack, lost in the river two years ago when a boat occupied by his father, Butch DeMatteis, and his friend Ernie Johnson capsized. The knapsack still held a pair of his father’s shoes, a couple of candy bars and a wallet containing $225 and credit cards belonging to Johnson. “When he told me what he had found, I couldn’t believe it,” Butch DeMatteis said. The fisherman found his lucky catch rewarded with $100 from the grateful Johnson, who said he plans to have the recovered cash “bronzed and mounted on some kind of plaque.”
--Like the old woman who lived in the shoe, Maria Benita Olivera reports of having so many children she doesn’t know what to do. The 49-year-old Argentine woman says she gave birth to her 32nd child, a boy, this week. She has been having babies pretty steadily since the age of 13, when she gave birth to triplets, she told the Argentine news agency NA. Olivera told the news agency that she had 25 babies by her first husband and seven by her second, but she remembers only the names of the triplets and the last seven youngsters. Nearly all of her children were born on the farm where she lives near San Juan, she said, and, in one case, she gave birth alone in a barn and had to cut the child’s umbilical cord with a razor blade. All of the children are “alive and healthy,” Olivera said. But, if she has one more baby, “I’ll die,” Olivera told the news agency.
