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A good portion of my afternoon was spent attempting to smoke bees out of my chimney. Though my neighbour couldn't see any bees in non-operational chimney in my bedroom (even though that's where we could hear the buzzing and where some bees had emerged) so we checked the non-operational chimney in my son's room, which despite being non-operational was full of dirt that rained down on us as we checked it. No sign of bees. Could it be (no pun intended) that the bees were actually in the chimney from the living room and we were just hearing them through the brickwork? What about the bees that had come into our bedroom? Were they just lost? Why couldn't we hear the bees from downstairs. Four flues all come up to the same chimney stack, two from these bedrooms and two from the living room and snug. We ended up trying to determine which chimney pot corresponded to which fireplace. It was clear which chimney pot the bees were going into as we could see them from outside, but it took ages to find out which one it was.
Do you want to have a guess?
Yes, it was the one in our bedroom.
I suppose the bees were the clue.
I don't know if there aren't that many bees in there or if the bees have just made a hive in the brickwork. We could definitely hear the buzz of bees. Or possibly a man pretending to be loads of bees. But he would be easier to find.
As our bedroom chimney is capped (though annoyingly with a slightly bigger than a bee sized hole in the cap) it was hard to get smoke to draw (and most of the smoke ended up in the bedroom) but eventually it came out. It didn't seem to dislodge any bees.
The bee noise has only been (no pun intended) here for a couple of days, so maybe only a couple of bees have moved in. My neighbour said that if a swarm moved in then that could be 20,000 bees and that there wasn't much we could do to get them out without dismantling the chimney.
Though after the smoking the bees went quiet, so maybe they both got annoyed by the smoke and left. I stuffed the bedroom chimney with a duvet, a box and loads of plastic packaging in the hope that this would stop the 20,000 potential bees coming into our bedroom. It's a really big chimney and was super hard to block up, I wonder why it's out of commission. It'd be pretty cool to have a working fireplace in the bedroom.
Anyway a couple of hours down and no definite progress. We might just have to get used to bees.
Nearly finished the audiobook of The God Equation by Michio Kaku. I'd love to say I understood it all, but I have understood some of it and it's fascinating stuff, even in quantum physics starts to feel like a student's bad drug nightmare after a while. Although we live in four dimensions, string theory suggests there are ten or maybe eleven dimensions in total and Kaku compares what we perceive as reality in four dimensions to being like a shadow (existing in two dimensions according to him - though maybe it's three because it still is affected by time) so maybe we're some kind of shadow of the real creatures or beings that live in the higher dimensions. Woh dude, you've blown my mind.
Our universe might just be a bubble that displays the right properties for longevity whilst other universes that spring up without the right physics pop much more quickly. Yeah man, let me smoke a bit of that.
My favourite bit is the names that physicists have given to the supersymmetric particles that they theorise must exist to balance up the various particles that we know about. They call them sparticles. And then each one just is the name of the particle that exists with an s in front of it. So quarks have squarks, neutrinos have sneutrinos and leptons have sleptons. This just sounds like my daughter making up words. And they're lucky there was no particle named after my old geography teacher Mr Hitt.
I walk through the countryside as I listen to this book, wondering if anything I can see is real and marvelling at the fact that we have got so close to understanding our universe even if I suspect, every new discovery will just move the goal posts and give us something else to figure out. And somewhere out there is SRichard SHerring. I hope he's OK.
