03 of 30 - Moving Bees
Okay I have like thirty bee stings and didn't get any sleep last night, and have to meet with secret agents tomorrow so this entry will also be quite simple. Its just going to be an account of my bee trip and such.
Dave and I left here shortly after 6am on Monday. This of course put us through rush hour traffic through LA d= Then the five north was closed entirely in Sacramento. Like, not just for half an hour, but UNTIL JUNE 9TH. Craziness. Fortunately I just routed us down the 80 West into Davis and then up the 113 back to the 5 above Davis. Unfortunately since we were running late we didn't stop in Davis but I waved.
Now if we weren't running late already we got a flat tire just outside redding. We drive 570 miles and get a flat tired just 20 minutes from our destination! Also Dave and flipped off a trucker seconds before our tire blew out -- I surmise the trucker put a voodoo hex on us.
So we pull over and Dave's like "whatever this'll only take ten minutes to replace." We've got a good spare on the truck and he's got all the tools ... but we can't get the spare off! We try poking it with the long rod intended to poke through an twist the thing to release the spare but no luck. We try the other end. We try more poking, and more. We try two and a half hours of poking. Nothing!
A cop shows up. Shines his flashlight down there and says it looks like somethings sheared off and thats why its not working. We call AAA and a towtruck guy comes and says we're missing a crucial attachment to the rod and that without it its impossible to get the spare off ... says he knew someone that had to order one once, it took ten days. Helpful. I'm starting to get the impression it would be a lot easier for someone to steal the sterio than the spare. Heck, they could probably steal the engine more easily than the spare tire!
Since we're twenty minutes from our destination we call the guy we're meeting, Ed Allen of Allen's Bee Farm and ask if he could meet us with tools. He shows up and within less than five minutes Dave has used a bolt-cutter to snap something off and get the spare free finally. After that we are quickly able to replace the tire, though at one point the car almost slipped off the jack and killed Dave. Altogether the flat tire delayed us three hours.
So we go and pick up the bees as the sun sets. I was doing pretty good until on one of the last boxes my glove and sleeve came apart and my sleeve got filled with bees. So they stung up my arm pretty good and I got a few stings elsewhere.
With 96 hives in tow we immediately set on down the road south. Dave wanted to specifically move the bees at night since they're calmer when its cooler and we're less likely to traumatize people at gas stations by pulling up next to them.
Arrived at our destination near Perris Lake, Riverside County, California, at 11am. Unloaded the bees. If each hive weighs around 50 pounds, and there's nearly 100 of them, that means the two of us each moved more than a ton of beehives! O=
Finally got home around maybe 2pm. 2pm on a Tuesday and I had already worked 32 hours for the week!!