I got the call around 5pm to come the next day to pick up the bees we'd ordered back in January. The next day was Easter Sunday, and this was a few weeks earlier than we were expecting them, but with COVID-19, I didn't have any other plans, and I really didn't know what would happen if I'd said "no". We hastily put up two panels of stockade fence to minimize the person-height bee traffic in our neighbor's yard, cleared a section in the back corner of our own and set up the hives.
I set out for New Jersey at about 6pm. I hadn't left my street, much less the state, in over a month. I was white-knuckling the steering wheel until I was certain that I did indeed remember how to drive, but traveling the empty streets of the city was pretty surreal.
I got to the apiary just after 7pm, popped the back hatch, and two men swiftly dropped two wooden boxes filled with thousands of bees in the back of our new-to-us Subaru Forrester. I handed off an envelope of cash, and with zero human-to-human contact, I was off, headed home with all my new friends.
When you're transporting bees in shoddily made wooden nucs, some are bound to get out and fly about the car. I was prepared for this, and I cooly pulled onto the New Jersey Turnpike headed North....
.... and then I noticed my temperature gauge was blinking. And then it was just on, and then, even worse I figured, it was blinking many different colors very quickly.
I made several frantic phone calls from outside the car pulled over on the side of the highway. It's one thing to be driving at a healthy clip towards home with a car full of bees, but it's another thing entirely to be trapped in that car with them, so I paced beside and kicked the tires while I figured out what to do. The solution was two-fold: I'd call AAA, and I'd force my brother to rush down from about an hour north to pick me up so that no one's health was compromised in the cab of a tow-truck.
It took two tow-trucks to complete the process due to some business or political detail that I didn't really care to figure out. The first tow took us to an auto body shop just off the highway where our second truck would pick up the car and tow it home. After watching the Subaru bounce erratically on the back of the flatbed trailer, I knew all my little bees would be concussed if I didn't get them into the back of my brother's car for the final and longest leg of this saga. My brother did not like this idea. My brother does not like bees. At all. We negotiated, promises were made, and finally I was able to inform the four guys who had now assembled around the car in the lot, that I just need to get my couple boxes of bees out of the car before we continue on. The biggest burliest of these guys turns a little green and says, quite matter of factly, "Oh hell, no." He's the second tow truck driver, it turns out, and apparently deathly allergic to bee stings. He also does not have any epinephrine on him. A short conversation about liability and anaphylaxis later, and one of the other guys agreed to drive the car onto the flatbed.
My brother did really well on the drive. He only threatened to squash one bee, and she managed to make it through the trip unscathed.
At about 10:30pm, we dropped the bee boxes in the yard; finally home.
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