B's

The short version:

My kitchen was sticky.
I left the window open.
Some bees cleaned up.

The longer version:

I’d been making apple jelly. There were pillow cases filled with boiled apple pulp hanging from the beams in the kitchen, dripping their clear rose-tinted juice into bowls on the kitchen table, with a dribble and a splash here and there. As well, there were several frames of honey brought in from the busiest hive, sat on the bench so that we could scoop off what we needed for our toast with a knife or teaspoon and newly filled jars of plum jam, fresh from the brass pan, stacked along the pantry shelf so that I could show them off to any visitors to the kitchen. And visitors are what we got. Bees don’t pass at all well through glass, but an open window it seems, is an invitation to every busy bee to call in and sample our jammy delights. The first bee in liked what he found and danced his revealing dance to his mates and there they all were, robbing my nest when I returned home at the end of the day.
The kitchen was a’buzz! My daughter was appalled. Bees crawled and flew everywhere. They poured in the open window, but seemed incapable of finding their way back out again, battering instead, against the inside of the glass. Their numbers swelled. The only solution was to remove the sweet stuff.; the comb honey, jelly and jam, all smothered in bees, to the laundry where I locked them in and their friends out.
It took until dusk before the to-ing and fro-ing stopped and the kitchen was largely bee-free. Careful scooping up and flicking out reduced the indoor population significantly, though some remained behind to amble across the floor over night, into shoes and behind curtains, in order to get a head-start in the morning, but there was to be nothing for them, nor for us to put on our toast, save peanut butter.
For the coming week, til the bees have forgotten about our kitchen and its sticky delights, it’s windows shut tight and doors firmly closed. And peanut butter on toast.