My husband has had experience with beekeeping in the past, but this was my second time tagging along in the experience with him since we got married. Sunday night we were excited to help the beekeeper from whom we currently source our honey to move 6 of his hives to a new location.
We arrived at around 19:00pm to help him strap the hives, ensuring that they would be secure while being transported. When we arrived, he mentioned that the bees were noticeably more agitated than usual, likely because the gardener had disturbed them earlier that day. This made me quite nervous, especially when one of the bees tried to crawl its way through my hair.
After helping to secure the hives, which only took about 20 minutes, we enjoyed a coffee while waiting until it was dark before we proceeded to put the hives onto the back of the vehicle. We had to wait until it was dark because then the majority of the bees would be back in their hives. If we had moved the hives too early, we would have left many of the bees behind as they would still have been out and about.
When it was dark enough, we returned to the hives to close their entrances with stuffing. This was so that the bees wouldn't fly out while being transported. Although these hives were 'empty' (they did not have honey in them), they each weighed up to 30kg. So my husband and the beekeeper did the heavy lifting while I handled the smoker and the torch. We used a red light because bees can't see red light, unlike using a normal torch and having the bees swarm towards the light.
It took us approximately 10 minutes to drive to the farm where the bees would be staying for the next few weeks, and about 20 minutes to offload the hives. This farm has a considerable amount of hectors of marigold fields. The beekeeper explained that he had never heard of marigold honey, so we are all excited to find out how the bees work with these flowers over the next few weeks and to see what consistency of honey these marigold fields produce as well as what the honey will taste like.