Tonopah Rob's Vegetable Farm

A neighbor called asking if I wanted to remove a swarm of bees they weren’t feeling the love for. With all these flowers on my farm needing pollination I thought I could have the love for these bees who had been cruising the area looking for a place to call home. Fortunately for me this coincided with a near freeze on Thursday morning and just before dawn while the bees could hardly move I went over and shook them from their slumber. Ok, so I didn’t actually go over Indiana Jones-style and brashly walk up to a tree and shake 10,000 bees off a limb. The way it really happened was like this: after putting on two layers of clothes and gloves, I put on my straw hat and then covered it, my head and my face with a mesh onion bag, then duct taped everything shut. Cloaked in my cocoon, with as much protection as I could muster, I quietly approached the tree and delicately sprayed sugar water over the three seperate veins of the colony to shrink its size (somewhere I read this causes the bees to contract and draw closer) so I would have less mass to work with before panic set in – with me, not the bees. Next up, I strategically placed my Rubbermaid X-5000 bee box under the bees and as gently as I could I tried to give a firm jolt to the branch and like a ballet move the bees dropped en masse into my bucket. Moving with the style of a real apiarist (although I’m certain my appearance may have been a shade away from professional and more in line with the absurd), I soon had tucked the bees into the back of my truck on their way to their future home. I transferred the still groggy colony to their hive and hope they enjoy their dark protected box with a farm full of fresh blossoms just waiting for some wayward proboscises to come looking for yummy nectar.