Moving Day
Many people have never been involved in moving a bee yard from one location to another.
First we stage the bees late in the day, if not during the full darkness. Why during the night? This allows all the bees to land at home and not be out foraging for honey or pollen. If you move the hive during the day only sever feet away, a large majority of those bees will land in the old location where they have imprinted as their home location.
Once our truck shows up, the fun begins, actually the stress of driving a pallet loader in the dark is not that much fun. The stress levels are high as we work deliberately to stack all pallets evenly and cube out the semi trailer.
On this hot night the bees were out trying to cool off. We run a tarp the length of the semi-trailer. Then we place boards over the tarp one per row of hives so the straps keep the same amount of pressure directly down on each row of hives stacked three pallets high. Sorry about the first few seconds the video is blurry. Hard to work at night with head protection on.
The last words of wisdom to our driver; “please watch out for deer on the road’. He assures us he has never hit a deer. But 4 years ago, our driver had to brake quickly to avoid a herd of deer on the road, spilling 16 hives. We lost half or 8 hives did not recover. The road was closed for 5 hours as we had to work during the night to clean up, restack and tie the load back down.
Moving bees is stressful.
But come morning they have a new home. Exhausted. Hungry. We collapse in the truck to get some sleep before we head home.
Here are two pictures of eight different bee yard locations where our bees will enjoy the heavy and nectar laden sainfoin crops.
Producing a light, white honey that so many of our customers love!
We love our summer bee locations. The land owners are amazing dedicated farmers. No chemicals are sprayed. We have cool clear mountain streams for the bees to drink from. In a drought water is everything. A single bee hive will drink one gallon of water per week. For us, this means thousands of gallons will be needed. Moving Day is a new chapter, but not one that is NOT without stress and hard work.