Saturday we got a phone call saying that the bees were a bit delayed and wouldn't arrive till around 6:00 p.m. Since it's a two-hour drive one way, I knew right away that the delay would put us home pretty darn late. I also had someone who had agreed to meet me up at the delivery location to mark all 20 queens. (No way were they going to hide from me this year) So that meant a phone call to him to explain the delay. He's a really great guy so that was fine.

Waking up that morning to a beautiful day made me feel like it was all going to work out just fine. The day started to get a little rainy looking after lunch, and because we don't have a cover on the back of the truck we decided to see if we couldn't find one. I know what a time to try to find a cap for the back of the truck. It turned out that we were not able to find one, but we did order one and in about 10 days it will be here. Jim became creative and as usual rigged something up to work.

We headed out and arrived a few minutes early. I brought my bee jacket and Jim didn't, the reason I did was because I thought that Paul and I would be marking the queens out back behind the honey house and I wasn't sure what would be back there. As we drove up we found the truck had just arrived and they were in the middle of unloading all the bees. I can't explain it any other way than to say, there was a roar of a buzz coming from inside the truck and then in the honey house. I've never seen that many bees in one place at once. Over 900 packages of 3lb. bees. Now I did a little research and found in the Beekeeping for Dummies book that each 3 lb. package contains between 12,500 - 15,000 bees. The poor things I'm sure were a little cranky riding in the back of a truck coming from California, but I listened to the truck driver explain how the temperature in the back of the truck was monitored and when it got a tad to warm a sprayer went on automatically to keep the girls pretty cool.

Paul showed up and Jim and I and a friend of Paul's started an assembly line of marking all the queens. Now let me explain, the reason it was a bit tedious was because we had to write the package number on each queen cage, so that we could make sure that the package got the queen that they have known to be theirs back. (If they get the wrong one, they could kill her) Each package had to be opened, so that means we had to spray down each package with sugar syrup, we had to remove the feeder and then take the queen cage out and replace the feeder before all the bees escaped. Once we got all the queens out we took them over to a workbench and I pulled the cork out, passed them to Paul, he marked them and then passed them back to me. We had a few escapees during the adventure, but they were all captured and then all the queen cages were re-introduced to their own packages.


As we drove home the thunder and lightning flashed all around us. I don't know how we managed to avoid the heavy rainfall. We just ended up getting a few sprinkles here and there. The last couple of miles were the worse. As soon as we arrived home I jumped out of the truck, opened up the garage and made room for the boxes to sit on the floor.

It was a really really long day, but we made it.