Well let me back up a little. Yesterday morning I got a phone call from someone who was looking for a nuke for a friend of hers. I missed the call and had to call back. I told them to have him call me and I'd see what I could do. Now I have to admit, I started to have a great conversation with myself and it kind of went a little like this. . ., "What the heck do you think you are doing? You have no idea how to move a hive, much less what you need to pollinate anything. What makes you think you can pull this one off? Then the other side of me said, "You know this could be a real learning experience, an adventure. We are not talking a million hives, just one little bitty one." About that time the phone rang and I had to put the conversation I was having with myself on hold and it turned out to be the gentleman who needed some bees. Very nice man seems that he has had his cherry trees for a number of years and never really have been able to get a good crop from them. I asked him if he would be interested in trying to start a colony since he told me that he had several other fruit trees. He didn't seem to buy that idea too much. He asked if he could just have them come over for a couple of weeks. About this time I was starting to think that my poor girls were going on a big sleep over. Well it made the task seem a little easier. I told him I'd have to think about it and talk to my husband, since I wasn't sure about how this would all work out.
Later that night Jim came home and just as I was explaining it to him the phone rang and it was this very nice gentleman again. Jim said, "How much are you going to charge him?" I kind of cringed a bit and said; well I sort of said maybe if the cherries come on, he could give me some. Jim just shook his head. I quickly went into the whole story of it being a learning experience and that if this worked out I promised that I'd get better at the charging thing.
I ended up calling Uncle Ted, he told me what to do, gave me some great ideas and between Jim and I we came up with a plan. So its just minutes until we start out and I'm feeling a little nervous right now. I'm starting to imagine that my bees will not live through this adventure and that I'm being a really bad mom. What kind of person can I be doing this to them. They just got here three days ago and now here I go, loaning them out like yesterdays newspaper . . . . .
TaDah. . . We are home.
And we did some things right and we did some things wrong.
I kept asking Jim if he had it all figured out and he assured me that he did. We moved the truck out to the yard and loaded up the hive. Uncle Ted told me to put a screen on the top so that they would have ventilation. We put the Cover on as well. The screen had an opening in it so that it still got ventilation and Jim used the Dewalt and screwed down the hive to the bottom board and put screws in a hive entrance cover so there would be no escapees. We loaded up the hive and he strapped it all down. I had a stand that wasn’t being used and we loaded that in as well. (Oh, I forgot to mention we used the smoker to get the bees down from the feeder, before we put the screen on. It was really neat to see how much comb they had managed to draw out in just a few days.)
Here is what we did wrong thing. After we got everything loaded up and drove away, Jim looked over at me and said, “Did you grab the smoker?” I of course looked at him and said, “No, didn’t you?” Then he said, “What about the hive tool and the brush?” This was about when I figured out that this was something I’d have to remember not to forget to do the next time . . .
Like I said, a learning experience.
We arrived and Don was ready and pretty excited to see the girls show up. We unloaded them next to his barn near his fruit trees. Jim had to use a chisel and hammer to come up with an entrance reducer and I put feed in the feeder and put a big rock on the top. I took a few photos and one last look back and drove away.
Boy I feel like I abandoned them . . ..
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