More 'Free Bees' Than I Expected

I'm Nathaniel.  N for short.  Hi!  We'll start at the beginning.  You can't hear it, but there's 'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC playing in the background while you read this.  It makes it more epic ... trust me.  I went to pick the bees up in the afternoon on April 4th.  They'd been delayed a week, but it had been cold anyway so maybe it was better this way.  Took maybe 40 minutes to drive to the designated pick up spot (some guy's house).  As I got close I'm thinking "I'll have to look closely at the mailboxes so I can spot the address".  Thankfully I could concentrate because I had turned the radio off.  As an aside ... why do we do that.  I listen to music at work 90% of the time, but I have to turn it off to look at mailboxes?  Maybe they'll do a RadioLab episode on it (http://www.radiolab.org/).  Anyway, as I turn a corner there is a huge box truck in a driveway with bees flying in and out.  I mean a LOT of bees.  Unfortunately these bees don't have anywhere to go because they aren't 'with a hive'.  I had a veil and my epi-pen in the car just in case.  But I decide I don't want to be 'that guy' so I leave the veil in the car and go to ask for my two boxes of bees.  It took a couple minutes as there were a few other people picking up their bees.  I stood perfectly still and tried to plaster a smile to my face.  Eventually it's my turn so I ask for my two boxes of bees and the kindly older fellow goes into the truck to get them.  He comes back with two good looking boxes of bees.  The bees seem happily clustered in the top 2/3 of the box.  There are a lot of bees on the outside of the package though.  Not what I was expecting.  I think ideally I would have had a kindly older fellow (this is where the similarities end) in a white tuxedo hand me two boxes of bees which greet me in a gentle buzz (basically professing their love for me already) with NO BEES ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE BOX.  Back to reality, the fellow asks if I want to see the queen.  'Sure' I say.  He then slams one of the boxes as hard as he can on the floor of the box truck.  The bees are not happy.  They buzz ... a lot.  It sounds uncannily like 'buzzzz we will remember this forever buzzzzz'.  But with a lot of pissed off bees in the bottom of the package I can see the queen in her cage.  He then shows me the other queen.  Super.  I gingerly ... trying very hard to avoid the 'free bees' still on the outside of the package ... pick up two boxes of bees to carry them to the car.  I set them down to call my wife (Laura [L for short {at least in this blog}]) to tell her that I have the ladies and will be departing shortly.  She tells me to make sure I text her when I get home so she knows something bad didn't happen.  That definately kept my confidence high.  Anyway I put the packages in a shallow plastic storage bin so they don't slide around and close the trunk.  Unfortunately when I say trunk I mean 'back of the SUV', so there is nothing but space between me and the ladies.  I roll the windows down partway in the back and set off for home.  Thankfully it's still warm 75F, so the windows down is okay.  I can see maybe 20 bees just sitting on the back window.  About halfway through the trip they sort of cluster towards the bottom of the back window.  One bee makes it up to the second row of seats, thankfully she stopped there.  After a very tense 45 minute ride home (I drove a bit slower with 20,000 bees in the car), I made it home.  I wonder what the people driving behind me thought?  Here's a picture of the ladies in their packaging box soon after I got home.

Here's a close up.

See the 'free bees' still hanging on?  It's crazy right?

Anyway, after I got them home I sprayed them with the 1:1 sugar to water mixture we had made the day before.  This was after I had opened the trunk and let the bess disperse who had decided to let go of the packaging.  Mind you no bees got out of the package, just some bees were on the outside of the packaging and they decided to investigate the back window as I said earlier.  So they're fed now, so I moved them into the nice cool (53F) garage when it decides to rain outside.  After L gets home we go down to the garage to look and they actually seem calm.  Not much buzzing, just a faint 'buzzz it's chilly in here buzzzz'.  We decide the garage is a bit too cold so we put them in the actual basement (at a balmy 58F).  There are still about a dozen or so 'free bees' on each package.  I assume they can't (hopefully won't) find their way upstairs.  Another aside here - so I call the bees 'the ladies' because they're mostly female.  Maybe I'll put some bee biology in another post since I just wet your whistle.  That's it for pickup day (Success!!) I think I'll put the actual installation in the next post.