Every spring Tony’s Grocery, Sportswear, Hardware, and Deer Processing would run a special on carpenter bee traps and tennis rackets. If you bought a bee trap you would get a tennis racket for free or vice versa. They were both the same price. Tony had won a shipping container full of tennis rackets from a storage locker auction. Unfortunately, tennis was an incredibly unpopular sport in rural Georgia and he never had any balls in stock because the nursing home bought them up to put on the bottom of canes and walkers every time he got a new shipment. He was having quite a hard time getting rid of them so he held a different special almost every month. Bee trap and free racket. Free racket with every purchase of a pound or more of pork meat. Two free rackets with the processing of a deer over 70lbs. “I’d give the things away for free but ain’t nothing free in this world except breathing and dying.”

Tony made his bee traps by hand...a contraption consisting of an untreated wood box with a couple of holes drilled through it, mounted on top of a mason jar with a plastic coke bottle jammed inside. The bees would go through the holes in the box and search for a place to bore and crawl down through the coke bottle to fall inside the jar, unable to figure out how to get out. “The more of them that get stuck in there the more they attract the others to come on in too.”

Nancy “Morning Glory” Habersham had a horrible problem with carpenter bees at her house. “Every year these dang things get up on my porch and just start vibrating them drills in their fannies up on the trim and molding...one it’s fine...the next, dust to dust!” Nancy had heard about Tony’s traps in her Sunday school class and bought ten of them. Tony also gave her ten tennis rackets. She did not want or need the rackets and tried to explain that to Tony but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Who even plays tennis around here? Ain’t like Tony even has any of them green balls.”

Nancy put the traps up around her house and left the rackets in the trunk of her car to rot. She sat on her porch and watched as one by one the enormous bees clumsily danced around the dangling wood boxes, landed, and backed their way into the traps. Within no time she had jars full of buzzing and vibrating bees, bumping around and fighting with each other like drunken blimps.

Now that she had all these bees Nancy realized she had no idea what to do with them. “What do I do now? Spray poison in there? That don’t seem right. Bless ‘em...but if I let them out they’ll just come right on back.” Nancy thought on it and figured her best and most humane course of action was to let them out, far away from her house. “They’ll probably go eat somebody else’s house...or not...but that’s on them.” In the middle of the night, she drove out a few miles from her house to Julep Recreation Department and sat at a picnic table under a newly constructed pavilion. Slowly and cautiously she unscrewed her jars, letting her bee’s fly off to freedom. Then as she was leaving she remembered the tennis rackets and thought she might as well dump them off there too. “Someone’ll use them...or not...but that’s on them”.

The bees did not find someone else's porch, instead, they took up residence in the delicious new wood of the pavilion, were fruitful and multiplied. They were a nuisance for a time but the population suddenly dwindled as the rackets also found a new home in the hands of a few local children. Tennis actually became popular in that spot of rural Georgia. Even if Tony didn’t have any green balls, they could have just as much fun using a yellow carpenter bee.