Hello to all our faithful customers. Olivarez Honey Farms has just notified us that shipment of package bees has been delayed a few days to a week, from our scheduled pick-up times due to weather and a loss of an entire semi load of 1750 packages of bees in the mid-west due to a road closure. This has bumped our shipment back as a result. To those who understand agriculture, no explanation is necessary. To those who are new to this, some things are simply not under our control. As always, we ask your patience and understanding as we work out details to what we hope will be a great beekeeping season.From their Facebook post:
The semi load of bees was stopped out west due to a 100 mile stretch of closed highway. There was over 500 semi's stopped and other vehicles as well in a small town located in a depression or valley, it was cold and all the vehicles were running their engines to keep warm. The exhausts caused the bees to become active to try to remove the fumes from the semi they were being transported in, the result endend in an over heated load and lots of dead bees.The load that my packages were on arrived 4/30/13 early in the morning. If you've never seen a pallet load of bees, this is what it looks like.
I helped a neighbor install her first ever bees in a brand new hive after we picked up our packages together. She did it all on her own with some coaching and a bit of marshmallow from me. One thing I noticed was that she moved much more slowly and bees had more time to climb and mound on the edge of the single deep. Drew and I moved much more quickly and, while we displaced more bees directly with frames since they were still piled on the bottom, it was much easier to squash fewer bees when closing the hives. If we would have had her smoker lit, she could have tried to chase them inside, but if they don't know the hive as home and there is no honey or comb inside to go after, I don't know what they'd do.
My two packages of Carniolans became 2013 Hive 2 and 2013 Hive 3.
