Bees!

There is quite a bit of cleaning up in Rhapsody. The biggest mess at the moment was due to some bees. While the previous owner had the boat stored in Arizona, it became infested with some bees that setup a honeycomb in the starter battery compartment. There are other places where the surface is sticky from the wax the bees left behind.

The bees are now dead. I was told a bug bomb was used to kill them. Now, they're laying all over the place. Because of the wax, they are sticking to things. A couple of the portholes are covered in a thin layer of wax and some of the wood surfaces are sticky too.

Here's what the areas look like.

It will likely take a little time to clean up after them. While reading up on how to clean up after bees, I mainly found info about beeswax candles. Similar concept. I found two different opinions about how to clean up. One was to heat up a surface and scrape it off or freeze a surface and peel it off. Since I can't freeze the boat, heat might be the option.

What I'm thinking right now is to use hot soapy water. The soap I'm consider is just regular dish soap since it's something I have on hand at the moment. Today I bought a couple 5 gal. buckets that I can use to fill up with hot water to take to the boat.

While I was cleaning things up yesterday, I did try scraping the bottom edge of the battery compartment.

It was pretty soft and gooey. Since some of the sticky parts are in visible areas, I'm hoping the hot water idea works so I don't ruin the finish. In the picture above, you can see I took out the honey comb too. That was super fragile and fell apart easily.

Since I checked the batteries with my volt meter yesterday and they showed 0 volts, I'm just going to take them out. Since the bees were mainly in the starter battery side, I'll likely take that one out first so it gives me more room to clean up and the house battery can wait.

UPDATE 10 Apr 2012: Hot soapy water helped clean up a lot of the sticky parts. I'm still cleaning so it'll be finished soon.