The Bees' Knees

Matthew here.

Chances are, if I've cornered you at any time in the past 10 months, I've talked to you about bees. I've told you that I'm going to get two bee hives. That I'm going to be a beekeeper. That I've been building hives. That I'm going to keep my bees in Woody's big messy back yard. That my dad is getting hives too. And that I've been buying equipment. (Somehow Emily didn't pay attention to all of this and, about a month ago, asked "What? You're geting bees?")

Yesterday, the bees arrived.

Dad and I got on the road at 5am and drove into Lehi at about 9. We drove up to a huge warehouse, parked, and stood in line with hundreds of other beginning bee keepers ("newbees" as it says in the Deseret News article) to buy some of the millions of bees that had had been loaded into a semi trailer in Chico, California and trucked to Utah overnight.

We filed in-- about 70th in line-- and I heard, for the first time in my life, the buzzing of over a million bees. The crowd was quiet and listened to the quiet hum for a minute or two, until the machinery started and folks started talking. In line we heard plans for the coming weeks, advice for "newbees", and if the rest of them were anything like Dad and me, bravado and bluffing.

There were packages of bees on pallets all along one wall in the warehouse. The professionals got to pick-up their bees first and their insects were loaded with forklifts into trailers. Each pallet had 90 packages, and each package had between 10,000 and 15,000 bees, with one queen. That means that there were between 900,000 and 135,000 bees on each pallet.

In the unloading process, at least one pallet fell and many of the packages were broken..., so there were thousands of bees flying around in the warehouse. Fun.

Here's a close-up of a bee package; now you don't have to imagine what 10,000 bees look like. You can see that the package had several bees clinging to the OUTSIDE of it (more on that, later) .

When it was finally our turn we picked out our bees (Minnesota Hygienic strain) and headed out the door. We walked to our vehicle with our four bee packages in hand and our stomaches in our throats. At this point, hundreds of the bees that had escaped the warehouse decided to congregate around and on us as we approached the vehicle.

I don't think I imagined this-- I swear that none of the other vehicles in the parking lot had more than even a few bees on them, while Dad's Isuzu had thousands of bees all over it. Maybe the golden color attracted them. I don't know, but Dad and I looked around for a while with puzzled looks on our faces, and decided to set the bee packages down so we could think through this situation. (When I say "puzzled" I really mean "terrified". And maybe, just maybe, we should have thought through the situation about 10 months ago.)

Now, this is what we had to sift through: We were about to get back into the SUV and drive for 4 or 5 hours and there were hundreds of loose bees on the OUTSIDE of the bee packages. Because we had planned on the bees coming in neatly-packaged boxes, we didn't bring bee suits. That means WE WOULD HAVE TO DRIVE NEARLY 300 MILES IN A CAR WITH A THOUSAND LIVE BEES BUZZING AROUND US.

After we thought it through we decided that we didn't have any other choice, and placed the bees into the car with us and drove home. We were terrified puzzled. About once an hour we sprayed them with sugar-water to calm them, and let the meanest of the bees out of the vehicle. Dad drove. I was on guard. When the bees approached the front seats, we'd roll down the windows and blow them to the back of the SUV. It was fairly intense. We couldn't even pay attention to the Lois Lamour book on tape we'd listened to on the way there. (I wonder if Hondo ever ended up with the girl?)

We finally arrived in Toquerville-- totally over our fear of bees. The bees hadn't stung us yet, and we were safely at home, so we decided that we must be invincible. We sprayed our bees with sugar-water and let them rest in the shade until late afternoon when we could introduce them to their hives.

In the afternoon, we donned our suits and then shook our bees into their new hives.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but bees get annoyed when they get dumped into new hives.

Now, it might not make much difference to you, but those were Dad's hives. Below you'll see shots of my hives:

Don't let the blurry picture and the veil fool you. I'm terrified in this picture. (Perhaps you can see it in my body language.)


Some bee science for you:
In this shot, I'm placing the queen's cage between two frames before I dump the others into the hive box. She's in that little box, and the wire is there to hold it in place. The queen's box is plugged with a kind of candy. The bees that I bought aren't really her bees-- that is, they may or may not even be Minnesota Hygienics, and they definitely aren't from her hive-- The bee dealers just sell you any old type of bees so they don't really know her yet-- they just want to be close to her because she smells like a queen and they don't have anyone else to cling to. Funny thing is that if they could get to her right now they'd kill her. Over the next five days, the worker bees will eat away the candy and free her and by the time they get her out, they will be used to her smell and will accept her as their queen. After a few more weeks, all of the original bees will be dead and the ones that replace them will all be from eggs that my queen has laid. So, in a month or so, all of my bees will be Minnesota Hygienics. (And the "L" on my hand is for "Large"-- the size of the glove-- not "Left".)

Isn't this an ideal sight? It warms my heart.
Oh, and I was only stung once all day.