Jan

November

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November is a slow month in the bee yard; the honey crop is in, the fall hive work is done and it's down to a few mundane chores I'll talk about later. But first, a few words and pictures about key piece of equipment in the operation - the fork lift. It's all but impossible to run a commercial bee operation today without one for loading and unloading bees. Previous generations kept individual hives or "stands" and loaded them one at a time either by hand or using a truck mounted boom lift. Over the years, stands gave way to palletized hives and more efficient handling using an "all terrain" fork lift. You'll find a wide variety of these light duty fork lifts - especially the "home made" ones. We'll look at one example followed by a commercially built one.

This picture is from the spring of '89 - John (my son) was 15. The project in the farm shop that winter was building a fork lift for moving bees which we got involved with to pollinate the clover seed crop we produced. What you see here started out in life as a 1978 Chevrolet Blaser. Four wheel drive, automatic and plenty of power from a 350 V8 engine! With this as a start, it took about four months of intense labor and about $5,000 to build. There were no plans - the design evolved on the fly. I had seen another bee keepers' shop built fork lift constructed from a four wheel drive Jeep chassis, but it was stick shift - I wanted an automatic; the Blaser seemed like a good start.

What was the front (steer axle) of the Blaser is the back of the fork lift - reverse is forward and drive can go 100 mph - backwards! Although it never sees anything close to this it does zip around at 15 or 20 when necessary. Obviously, it isn't much help unless it goes with the truck and we started out using the tow bar to pull it behind the truck, but this soon gave way to a better method - hauling it on a trailer.

For moving bees, you need a fork lift with large tires for a smoother ride on rough ground, good ground clearance, all wheel drive, automatic transmission for constant forward and reverse and speed is helpful when spreading bees in an orchard. Short turning radius is another desirable feature. Shown here, the steeper angle of the engine keeps it short coupled for tighter turns. Lights are must as bees are usually moved at night.

This picture shows us loading a tractor trailer out of storage in January for the trip from Idaho to the almond orchards in California. It's 35 Deg. and spitting snow, so the bees aren't much interested in flying.

Two pallets of bees weighs about 1,000 pounds and with the Blaser's 1/2 ton running gear the lifting limit isn't much over 1,500, but that's enough to do the job.

This fork lift has been in service since it was built over 15 years ago. It continues to move bees and people on a regular basis.

The trailer makes it possible to take the fork lift when moving the bees out of state for pollination. This is January in Turlock, California - who wants to go back to winter!

When moving out of the orchard, bees are gathered and "banked" in stacks at the loading site the night before. This picture shows loading the next evening at dusk just as the bees finished flying for the day.

It only takes an hour or two to load tractor trailer truck and get it on its way if everything is organized and ready to go the night before.

Here's the store-bought version at around $20,000+. The big feature here is the fact that it is articulated (bends in the middle) so it turns really tight. In fact it will turn completely around in its own tracks. Most of these Swingers as they are called are diesel powered and they are probably the de facto standard fork lift in the bee industry. It's about the only commercially available unit that fits the job of light duty and go anywhere four wheel drive.

Aside from the price, the Swinger is hydrostatic (hydraulic) drive which means a top speed of about 8 miles per hour, so they are slow when moving over a distance. In spite of this, they are a very nice solution for moving bees.

And, moving bees is a fact of life if they are to be productive. It's more than moving them to a pollination job; many times they are moved to a Different location to facilitate nectar and pollen gathering either for honey production or build up of the colony. This is in sharp contrast to the hobby beekeeper whose bees may sit year round in the same back yard location and bear the brunt of a food supply that comes and goes.