Aaron and Annette rolled up with their station wagon full of bees. We were only one of many stops that day. You know how when you get a bee in your car you kind of freak out and pull over to shoo it out the window? Yeah, they don't really worry about that. Each of seven boxes held about 6,000 bees plus tons of loose bees just buzzing about the car.
This is what 6,000 bees in a box looks like.
The queen is in her own special box, which is plugged with a piece of candy. They put the queen box in with the workers and by the time they've freed her by eating through the candy they're all used to each other's scent and are one big, happy royal family.
This was the craziest part. They just shook the bees right into the hive. When they don't have their own hive or queen to protect they're relatively calm. The interesting thing is that they're thousands of individual creatures acting as one. They seem to have some sort of collective consciousness.
While the bees acclimated to their new home there was a lot of buzzing and flying around the yard, hundreds of bees, in fact. But I found it oddly soothing to be in the midst of this swarm of bees. They weren't aggressive and their humming was rather peaceful.
