30,000+ Pickup

Last Saturday morning at 6am, I was on an express bus on my way to the Union Square Farmer's Market.  Bleary eyed and completely exhausted, I arrived to Union Square around 7:30am. The market was just getting started, vendors were still putting out their goods. And early birds were milling about.  Why was I there so early in the morning... on a weekend no less? 

I walked around for awhile, until I found what I was looking for.  I should have just gravitated towards the large crowd on the Southwest side of the park.  I can't believe I got here early, and I'm already last on line!

What was everyone waiting for, you might ask?  Look in the middle of this photo, do you see it?

Look closer, see it now?  There was much excitement, and camera crews everywhere.  Ahhhh, New York!

Okay, here's a better look.  See it now?  I came to meet our beekeeping teacher, Andrew and the folks at NYCBA.  My other 3 beekeeping partners and I had ordered two packages of bees from them and we were here to pick them up.  My teacher drives down to Georgia to pick up all the Italian honeybees from an apiary there.

Here's a closeup of his truck bed.  Can you imagine driving this truck from Georgia to NYC with a truck full of bees?  He does this trip once a year in the springtime.  Can you imagine what the state police would say if they pulled him over?  LOL.

Here's a photo of some of the bee boxes getting unloaded off the truck.  Each box contains about 10,000 bees.

I love this photo.  My fellow classmate Tom joked that he thought it was pretty funny that the women that was taking the bee boxes out of the truck was not wearing a protective bee suit, yet she was handing the boxes to the guy in the full bee suit.  haha.

The boxes are connected together, so they needed to be cut apart for distribution.

Here's our beekeeping teacher Andrew marking off names off his clipboard as we picked up the bees.  He looked a little stressed out.  There were lots of people there and lots of bees to hand out!

This is what we came to pick up!  Happy, happy bees.  I ended up picking up 3 boxes of bees.  Two packages for us and one box for a friend.  30,000 bees in total!

After we picked up the bees, our teacher and a fellow NYCBA member gave us a demo on how to pour the bees into the beehive.  My next blog post will be about the bee demo.