After my last post yesterday, Joel and I drove to Fall River to watch the demo installs and do our own. Apparently it was a big day at BCC...even the Bristol Bee was there!

Poor Everett must have been ready to curl up in the truck (bees and all) to go to sleep, having driven from Georgia in the past 24 hours, but he was a trooper.


Here's what a queen looks like up close (she's the one with the green dot):



The BCC students then installed two more hives, and then it was time to get our bees.

The truck was positively HUMMING with all those boxes of bees! I figure there were probably 40 boxes, and 9000 bees per box...that's a lot of bees!!


Back at home, we tried to go as smoothly as the demo did. On the whole, we did ok. I got stung once and apparently I didn't whack the box to get the bees down as hard as I should have, so there were a lot of bees still in the box when I finally surrendered, but it all worked out in the end.



I went out later in the day and they seemed to be doing their thing. I even located a drone and the girls had some fun holding him gently! Drones are male bees that do not sting, so kids can hold them without fear.