TEAM ACTIVITIES
City Bee Savers no longer moves honey bees to California to help pollinate the almond trees. Nevertheless, we thought it would be interesting for you to see how we loaded bees for transportation.
The last day of prep started at 4 pm and we worked continuously until 2am the following morning. Unfortunately we miss counted the number of hives and couldn't load our last 4 pallets. Because of these space restrictions I decided to go through all my hives and borrow resources from the smaller colonies to give to the larger colonies. That way all of the my hives going to the almonds could be extra large. At least there won't be any trouble getting them accepted for payment.
It was 80 F and humid the day we loaded the truck. It was important to wait until dark before loading the bees or else they get very confused and may not find their hive box. At night they retreat to the hive making it less stressful on them when we move their hive to the truck.
The video below shows loading one of the 98 pallets. There are 4 colonies on each pallet. We first needed to gather all the pallets from their various bee yards. We did this several days earlier. Then we needed to bring them to one spot for loading the semi. This had to be done after dark. Once they were all staged the loading began. it's a very time consuming process. you don't want to drop a pallet. I've seen it happen and it's not pretty. The final trip to California takes about 35 hours. 2 drivers drive continually only stopping for fuel.