In a Pickle – A Beekeeper’s Truck-Up
- The Sideways Beekeeper
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
It was intentionally left uncredited. Last month’s Apiarist’s Advocate eMagazine cover photo of a fully-laden-with-beehives 10-tonne truck precariously balanced on its side above a pond. Reader questions rolled in… Who had the bad day? What damage was inflicted to man and machine? And, most commonly, ‘how the hell do you get all those hives off in that situation?’. Now we get the full report from the beekeeper in question (still wishing to remain anonymous) who details his “major f-up” and lucky escape…
By The Sideways Beekeeper
I was really looking forward to lunch that day you know. I like to think I am a bloke’s bloke, but a nice spread of cheese and crackers, even pickles too, doesn’t go amiss when it’s hard-earned in the back-blocks. So, on this first day of chasing the mānuka flower and knowing I had a busy morning of trucking hives, I prepared myself a fitting menu for the midday meal, to be enjoyed with a view once my girls were in place, on site, high in the bush.
Instead that spread became currency, doled out to a collection of my johnny-on-the-spot staff who helped rescue the situation and the bees, plus a digger driver who delicately righted my keeled vessel and an on-call mechanic come to revel in my misfortune. Having conducted that important job, he eventually inspected an oil-soaked engine.
At that time, while something like four million bees frantically escaped their turned-upside-down-world with great disorientation as the beating sun crept higher, my mind was firmly on righting the situation – and I will get to the logistics of that. However, thoughts soon turn to ‘how did this happen?’ and, having relived the episode in my mind many times since, I think I might finally have an answer to that…
Survival by a Thousand Cuts
I’ve been carrying out this caper for decades now and people with such experience rarely make one mistake big enough to cause such a calamity. That was the case here. I believe it was a collection of contributing factors and – yes – my own distraction and poor decision-making key amongst them.
Like all good hive moves the day started in the dark and the hives were loaded, unblocked, as is our custom. A warm morning, we knew we needed to race the sun to get them higher into the hills and on site before the field bees went to work.
However, while loading the hives I noticed an oil leak in the crane mounted on the truck. This needed staunching and so I made a hurried call in to a nearby farmer’s shed, borrowed some tools, and remedied the bleed. The setback had me watching the clock more closely though, especially as big-yellow emerged big, and yellow, and the air warmed.
The truck travelled well as I pushed the pedal closer to the metal and I could tell there was some weight in these hives. Like many parts of New Zealand this season, my neck of the woods was hit with warm weather early in summer and these hives had stored up the best part of a full-depth box of honey already. Stacked two high, 72 to a load, that’s a lot of weight up high…
It’s even higher when the tires are over-inflated. I should have known and my hindsight on the matter is crystal clear but, when I climbed into the cab early that morning all I thought was ‘hmmm this new cab is a little higher off the tarmac than the old truck’. Yes, that’s right, this was a brand-new truck and this was my first time driving it in anger. No more than 500km on the clock. I kid you not. Murphy’s Law.
The shop had put 110psi in the front tires, 90 in the back. Factory operating pressure is 60, a later inspection of the tire-wall confirmed. That’s a bit of extra height and a bit less give than there should be…
If I had stuck to the main track it would have probably all been fine though. I didn’t do that though did I? Both luckily and unluckily in the situation, I’m the boss, meaning I own the company. Nobody wants the guilt of rolling someone else’s brand-new vehicle, so at least I don’t have that, but it did mean I was juggling about 10 work-related issues in my mind that morning as things went off track – literally
Slow Mo Oh-No
Yeh, I wasn’t fully concentrating and took the wrong turn. I soon realised this and was thus returning back down the hill and attempting to make a turn, from a poorly formed trail onto the main track, when this man and machine became unstuck.
Racing the clock, mind elsewhere, a vehicle on high heels and passengers – human and insect – travelling with over-packed lunch-bags, the combination was too much as we cut the corner and over… she … went. Seemingly in slow motion.
Honestly, I might be lucky to be alive. As you will see from the photos, my cab was precariously close to submerging the driver’s side in a muddy-bottomed stock-water dam. As it was, the driver’s window and wingmirror came to rest a few inches off the grass at pond’s edge, as a conveniently placed rush against the side of the headboard provided some small ground clearance to the cab. Riding solo, I was able to extricate myself from the stricken vessel through the top, passenger, side. Admired later, my footprints on the cab ceiling told a story.
Springing to Action
You can’t really dwell on your lucky escape long when you have that many bees hoping to make their own such escape though so, out of cell-phone reception, I set off on foot to the nearest farm house and land-line, a 3km walk.
I try to organise our teams of beekeepers to work, if not the same properties, then at least within some geographical proximity. Therefore, I was able to flag down a couple of our other beekeeping boys to come laugh, rescue, then laugh some more, at the boss.
With their truck-crane and hive forks we were able to extricate all 18 pallets of beehives from the truck, but it was no fast job. Just releasing the strops without a plan would have been carnage and left many a hive floating around a dam. What we devised was another set of strops holding the hives to the truck’s headboard while the lifting cradle was inserted to one pallet at a time and attached with a smaller strap. At that point the original transport strop was released and the pallet was plucked out and placed on the waiting truck – and wished better luck this time!
All that took a while. As did the arrival on site of a 14-tonne digger to right my new truck. Five or six hours, sweating bullets on a 25 degree day, before we were off again to get the bees to where they were supposed to ‘bee’.
We left one pallet of four hives behind to collect the field bees and that weekend a couple of pig-hunting mates reported walking past it and the stack was covered top-to-bottom, side-to-side, in bees.
What’s the Damage?
Every way you look at it – I got off pretty lucky.
My brand-new truck? A small dent in the cab, a few twisted cab mounts and that’s the amount of it. Amazing really. We didn’t even claim insurance, but that might have been out of pride…
The bees? A few of the brood nests took a bit of rearranging, but those 72 hives ended up reaping three tonne of honey, so about 40kg a hive. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it seems rolling their taxi does not overly limit honey bees’ productivity.
My wallet? Well that digger, mechanic and staff don’t come free, but it could have been much worse. There was a pond inches away…
My ego? Well, that’s probably got a ding bigger than the cab. Small price for a very important lesson learned though perhaps.
My physical person? Like I said, unscathed… well almost. As we both got to approximately 70 degrees from centre my much-fancied jar of lunch pickles sprang a vicious dive into the side of my head. A scar and resulting bald spot will be with me some time.
It hurt briefly, but not as much as missing out on my first, well-prepared, big lunch of the season. It was some nice cheese but, all things considered, probably a cheap price to pay.
Got a story of a sticky situation you want to share? Email editor@apiadvocate.co.nz
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