It's that time of year again, where we forget all the bad things that happened in beekeeping seasons past and get excited about new bees and new honey flows and all of the seasonal entertainments that come with a new year of bees. For us, that means getting ready for the season with last minute orders to Dadant and pretty much anyone else we work with - just to make sure everyone is as frantic as us. This year, we were running late as always, and made it by the skin of our teeth getting everything inorder. We called Patrick and Mark at the Tightsqueeze Dadant in Virginia and asked them to send us 160 double deep hives' worth of equipment with plastic frames and feeders, IPM boards, and robbing screens. As always, they may have cried a little when they were off the phone, but everything was ready to go for us. We talked to Susan and Tim down at the Carolina Honey Bee Company in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, and Bobby drove down to pick up the packages. As always, they were good packages, but we had a pretty good running joke when Tim told us one of the guys was red/green color blind so he couldn't tell the difference when they were marking queens, meaning we have both in this year's batch. We only had three packages not take out of 160, and by the look of it, they just moved over a couple hives into some monster colonies.
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