Allowing myself to be sweet talked into looking after somebody's bees while they went on their honeymoon.
She said when they got back she would bake me a cake.
The hives were an hour across town but it was only supposed to involve one visit, so I did it. But on a hunch, I went there day after they left as I thought from something that had been said that the bees might be brink of swarming. They were, bearding, & queen cells everywhere. So, raided their garage, found supers, unfortunately mediums, the others were deeps, made some major changes best I could to the hives configuration, & left. 3 hours plus mileage wasted.
2 weeks later the neighbour called, freaking out, there's a swarm in his tree. I drop what I'm doing (which cost me later), drive there, the swarm is at the very top of this incredibly tall tree, no way any sane person could get it. Check the hives, regardless of my efforts the previous visit, they were in full swarming mode & just went ahead & built more cells and swarmed anyway. Had to reconfigure my checkerboarding and other manipulations from the first visit & to prevent after swarms I go through & kill the majority of the cells, set up a swarm trap in the garden, and leave, best part of 4 hours wasted, peak traffic.
The couple get back from honeymoon & she rings me the same day. I explain what happened, I can tell in her voice she thinks I did a crap job. I tell her in a couple of weeks the hives will have laying queens, and she can put the still empty swarm trap away.
She made several more calls over the next few weeks her voice tone getting more annoyed every time. The queens never did mate & start laying, in the end I sent her free caged ones, but she was still not happy about what I "did" to her bees. No cake for me, and we haven't spoken since either.
Next time somebody asks me to do this, I'm going to be too busy.