Chris Hiatt

You have to diagnose the hive.

That's all by hand, manipulating the frames, pulling honeycomb out, looking for the queen, putting new queens in, medicating them, feeding them.

And yes, there's forklifts and trucks, and my back is less sore than what it used to be, but a lot of it is still pretty old school.

How many bee stings do you get a day?

Oh, I get stung about every day.

You said you had 18,000 hives, is that right?

Correct.

In the summer, the average hive could be 40 to 50 to even 60,000 bees.

But in the winter, it goes down to 30, 20, even the smaller hives, 10,000 bees per hive.

We pollinate almonds in California, apples in Washington, and we do a little bit of other things like cherries and plums and apricots and blueberries and a little bit of kiwi.

And then most of our honey production is in North Dakota.

You got to look at it like livestock when you see those cattle trailers full of cattle.

Same thing.

We throw about 400 to 500 hives on a flatbed semi, and we go four pallets tall, and every pallet has usually four hives on a pallet, and the forklift is loading it.

And when you have a dead out, then you have a spare spot on the pallet.

You got to move and complete the pallets.

So that's old fashioned work.

It always makes the news when a semi tips over.

Like last week, there was one in San Antonio, Texas that flipped over on the freeway.

And they always say 450 highs, which is actually so many million bees in it just for the scare factor and stuff.