Ideally, the next morning we wear double pants. (Bees like it when you are in their hive two days in a row and take boxes full of their preciously gathered honey.) We grab commercial aluminum bun/baking pans just larger than our medium bee boxes. We use five of these as bases on which to stack the supers in the back of the truck and a couple as temporary covers to keep bees out of the supers as we stack them. We take five outer covers to cover the stacks once they’re topped out. We take a (hopefully) well tuned Husqvarna leaf blower with a full tank of fresh pre-mixed, “canned” gas. We bring a smoker, smoker fuel, a propane torch with an automatic igniter, hive tools, bee brushes, BeeQuick and fume board (just in case), a couple of sodas, and ibuprofen. The smoker and the blower are kept away from each other in the back of the truck, even when the smoker’s not lit. Ideally, we dress out with cuff straps, jacket and veil, and have our gloves at hand before we head to the bee yard so we know we didn’t forget them and so we can park the truck close to the hives and shorten the distance we have to haul the supers. We try not to bring things that we don’t need.
At the bee yard, we leave the keys in the truck ignition, light the smoker, and smoke all the hives before cranking up the leaf blower. We pull the supers quickly, blow off stragglers and cover the stacked supers with bun pans as we go. When stacks are topped off, we replace the top pans with outer covers, grab the bee escapes, double check that the covers are back on the hives and the tools are in the truck, and roll to the next yard.
On the way back to the shop/Honey House, we text the ladies who comprise the bottling, marketing, and canteen departments of this vast enterprise. We back up close to the shop, fire up the blower to remove stragglers from the supers, stack the boxes inside, shut the doors, spray around the outside of the door with BeeQuick, move the decapping, extracting, and bottling equipment into place, change out of protective garb, and eat lunch.