Patient Beekeepers!

I was really impressed with 99.9% of everybody's patience yesterday! Getting bees to Alaska's Interior is not easy!  Flying the bees to Anchorage via Fed Ex or UPS is the easy part but you see, since we can't order enough bees to fill an entire cargo plane, if our bees were flown up to Fairbanks, they would be loaded onto the plane first and cargo being flown to Anchorage would be loaded last.  When the plane arrives in Anch. all the bees would be left on the plane while the Anch. cargo gets unloaded.  Depending on the weather and temperatures, our bees could either over-heat or freeze while the Anch. cargo is unloaded.  Also, the more take-offs and landings the bees go through, the harder it is on the bees.  So, flying the bees to Anch. and driving them up to Fbks. is the safest method of getting our bees up to Fbks.  This said, we still are dependent on technology and vehicles to do this.  Steve and Donna's truck had a check engine light come on while they were driving to Anchorage to pick up the bees.  Before picking up the bees they intelligently got the engine checked, which slowed them down for several hours.  They found out that it was just a computer glitch and but who wants to risk 160 colonies of honeybees on the Parks Hwy. if there is a mechanical problem.  By the time they got out to Big Lake, the day was mostly shot and no one could have hived their bees a 10PM Sat. night anyway so they decided to store the bees in their shop, feed them 7 gallons of sugar water and head north Sunday morning.  Anyhow, this is why the bees were postponed by a day.  I was very happy when I saw the packages with very little dead bees in the bottom of the boxes yet again.  I continue to be very impressed with the quality of the bees and the meticulous professionalism of John Foster in Sacremento and the Victors!  Thank you, John, Steve & Donna!!