Here we are just before we robbed the honey a few weeks ago. Pants tucked inside boots, to avoid bees crawling up pant-legs.

The year previously, on a "check-only" day, I thought that I'd get by with the wrong pair of boots. Bad choice. They stung my ankles like crazy!!!! Good thing that I had taken an anti-histamine prior to entering the bee yard. That year, we had some really pissy bees. The queens or the queen's mother's in two colonies may have got impregnated by some africanized drones.

We use a leaf-blower to remove the bees from the honey boxes.

The bees march right back into the colony:

In the spring of 2016, all 30 colonies were dead. So we replaced them with packaged bees. At $100 per colony, the bees in the bed of the truck I went to pick them up in were worth more than the truck.
