This morning I made a 1.5 hour car trip west of the ranch to a mountainous part of western Virginia to pick up four honeybee packages I had ordered November of last year. The trip to the pickup location started out fairly boring, but became more interesting as the increasingly bumpy rural roads twisted their way up into the very scenic mountains.
An example of bee packages from the last time I tried (and failed)
beekeeping. The wooden boxes all have screened sides, which allows the
bee to more easily respire and scare people. Each box contains three
pounds of female worker bees, one queen, and a leaking metal can filled
with sugar syrup to feed the bees during transportation. Also inside
the package is a tiny cage designed to contain the queen and protect her
from being killed by the worker bees. Eventually the workers will come
to accept her as their new queen, but until that time she will need to
stay in the queen cage.
It was these same features (i.e. twisty and bumpy) that made driving back to the ranch with four buzzing bee packages even less boring. Every time the car hit a bump or turned sharply each group of roughly 10,000 bees in each bee package would buzz more intensely for a few seconds. When we finally began to leave the mountains behind us the roads improved, the buzzing became less intense, and I began to relax more. It was then that I noticed through my rear-view mirror that there were a handful of bees flying around inside the car. Initially I was concerned that one of the packages may have had a leak, but, when no additional bees appeared in the vehicle it appears that my packages had a brought along a few external stowaways (not an uncommon thing at bee package pickup locations). For the remainder of the trip back to the ranch these stowaways remained in the back of the vehicle and eventually joined the rest of the bees during installation.
A few of the bees from a recently installed honeybee package conducting "orientation flights" to memorize the location of their specific hive.
Package installation in each of the top-bar hives went very smoothly and now I have to just leave them alone for the next three days. That is always the hardest part.
