A Trunk Full of Bees

You probably don't want to drive to church with Janene tomorrow. She picked up our bees today and one of the boxes had a hole in it. By the time she got home, about a hundred bees had escaped. There was no way to stuff them back in their box, so they remained in the car when she carried the boxes up the hill. They don't know where they live because the smell of the queen is still lingering in the trunk. We shooed some out of the trunk, thinking they would go find a home. Instead, they hung on the bumper - even after Janene drove the car up to Judy's house. So.... there they remain, unwilling to leave and doomed to die.

The good news is that by nightfall, the other 20,000 bees were safely in their new home on the hill - our new cliff dwellers. This year, we bought a new kind of bees. They are called Minnesota Hygenics. They are supposed to be able to keep themselves cleaner and able to fight diseases and pests like ants and varroa mites better than our Carnolians. They are supposed to be more aggressive, too. We didn't see that as we put them in the hive with their queens. The air was full of bees, but they didn't seem angry or threatening. We put them in a new location at the back of the garden, just in case.