Package Bees I

   We arrived back in snohomish yesterday morning at about 3:00 a.m.  We had no significant adventure this year. The lack of adventure in the context of package bees is a very good thing.  I did get a new camera for the occasion and I'm posting a smattering of photos from the trip.  We had a wonderful view of Mt Shasta as we drove down to Redding, CA to pick up the bees.

  This picture is included just to prove that I did actually drive some on the way down.

    Here we are unloading the empty shipping cages that were returned to the store from last year's package bees.  We carried down almost 700 empty cages.

   The packages are carefully stapled into place so the load can't shift. 2 million bees generate a lot of heat so ventilation is critical to the bees survival.  There will definitely be no shifting of this load.

  There are a lot of bees flying around that are lonely souls looking for a home. Bees want to be with other bees so they accumulate of the windows of the trailer and on the packages themselves.

    This is Steve Park, the owner of Steve Park Apiaries.  He is a very pleasant men to deal with and takes very good care of us.  The particular strain of Italian honeybees that he sells have got to be about the most gentle bees around.