It was the very start of my beekeeping career: as intended under the young-beekeeper support program, I ordered five package swarms, each with a purebred queen. But then came the logistics.
It was early July when I was due to get my first bees. The hives were standing ready, all I still had to do was pick up five package swarms with purebred queens from Gerasdorf, just outside Vienna. I thought I’d thought of everything: the bees shouldn’t get too warm during the drive, so I opted for a vehicle with air conditioning. My own car’s AC happened to be acting up again, so I borrowed my brother’s fancy car instead. That way, a cool, trouble-free transport was supposed to be a given, with the bees not overheating along the way.
The factory-installed sat nav was, predictably, useless. But phone navigation worked well enough to get me to the master beekeeper who had put together the starter packages for my first five colonies. There, I received a package swarm with a purebred queen in each of five orange multi-boxes. The staff member on site sprayed a bit of water onto and into the boxes to cool the bees down and keep them calm - from that point on, it was my problem.
About 100,000 bees went into the trunk. And they buzzed. So as I followed the sat nav trying to find my way back to Vienna, all sorts of thoughts raced through my head: was a closed sedan really the best idea for this drive? The pickup-truck owners in the beekeeping club had a helpful tip beforehand: “just put the boxes on the truck bed. I wouldn’t put them inside the cabin.” Right, thanks.
The bees seemed to get louder in the meantime. Should I turn on some music to calm them down? Maybe Mozart? Or would that just agitate them instead? That would be rather bad. Too bad I hadn’t googled that beforehand… how much further is it? Ah, only 20 minutes left.
What actually happens if someone rear-ends me? Do the multi-boxes hold up, or do 100,000 bees pour out onto anything that can’t hide? Worried, I steered the car all the way home. Everything went fine, and my wife met me in the garage. As we unloaded the boxes, she immediately made a video for her friends. The buzzing came through loud and clear on the video too. Within minutes the replies came in, and pretty much all of them questioned my sanity. Why on earth would I do something as crazy as taking up beekeeping. And on top of that, drive around with them in the car.
The bees went - strictly by the book - into the basement, into what’s called “dark confinement.” Depending on the source, this lasts one to three days and lets the package swarm and the queen merge into a single colony. After that, it was time to hive the bees. They immediately took to their new homes and started drawing out comb right away. Just as it should be.
Time to clean up: it was dirty in the car, on the shelf in the basement, and in the apartment, where I’d brought the empty multi-boxes to clean them - wherever the multi-boxes had stood, there was a mess. Here’s why: each multi-box has a feeder with sugar syrup inside. Some of it always spills - downward. And: bees produce wax, and that crumbles downward too. And then there’s all sorts of other sticky bits. Everything falls down, and right through the mesh floor of the multi-box. The lesson: always put something waterproof underneath when transporting bees - which, incidentally, also applies to transporting colonies in their hives - otherwise you’ll be cleaning up afterward.