0:00

"I don't think anybody anymore really believes that they could make a living on honey only in Oregon ... My business is primarily supplying bees as pollination service." He moves the bees at night when they naturally stay inside the hive.
"These nights get pretty long." It's the part of the job he worries about most.

0:30

"One of the worst things that happens to us is we get stuck. And you're out by yourself in the mud and muck and you got bees buzzing around and who wants to come and help you? It's probably the middle of the night."

0:41

Since this drive isn't far, he does manage a few hours sleep and still makes it to the orchard before dawn. The farmer called just the day before to say his pear blossoms need bees. Jim Donnely's there to help distribute the hives. "When I start up there I know how you do it. About every eight rows ... All right, if you just kind of tell me which row you want me to go in on."

1:00

They need to work quickly. All the hives must be in place before it warms up and the bees start flying. Bees reorient easily to the new hive site.
"We can pick them up and move them outside of the flight radius, which is about, say, a mile, and when they come out the next day in that new location, then they're forced to reorient to that new location and very quickly they'll identify that as their home spot."

1:26

But why pay to have bees moved here when wild pollinators would do the job free? Well, first, there aren't enough wild bees to cover these huge orchards.
"Another reason is they're using more and more chemicals which have had a tendency to kill off wild pollinators."
But the primary advantage is that by putting in plenty of hives, the bees visit all the blossoms in just a few days, rather than weeks. "That means that all that fruit will be harvested at about the same time rather than having to go in and pick five or six times."

2:00

Any insect that visits flowers can pollinate, but honeybees are the best. "Whenever a bee leaves the hive and goes out to collect nectar or pollen, it will stay on the same variety of plant on that whole flight. So it doesn't go from a dandelion to a cherry to an apple to a pear."

2:19

These are really no different from wild bees. They aren't domesticated. But George does manipulate the colony to make it more efficient. To find out how, we went along as he checked on the health of some hives.

2:33

"Now what does the smoke do for you?" "Okay, it calms the bees down a little bit." Inside the hive, it looks like mass confusion, bees moving in what seems to be haphazard motion. "It's always amazing to me that out of all that apparently random action, there is ... an overall structure which is very intricate and precise."

2:52

Bees of different ages perform specific jobs, all revolving around one thing, raising more bees. "There's the queen, right there." The first thing he checks is that the queen is healthy and laying lots of eggs. If not, he'll replace her with another, bred to have desirable traits like gentleness and high productivity. "She doesn't feed herself. She doesn't clean herself. All she does is lay eggs. She's the matriarch. But in another way she's being controlled by her daughters who regulate the amount of feed that she gets and where she goes. She's not in control at all. She is actually being controlled by the will of the hive."

3:36

Only about two percent of the bees are males. These drones have no stinger and do no work. Their only function is to mate with a queen. All the rest are infertile females. These worker bees do everything for the hive.

3:53

When the new bees first chew out of their protective covering, they don't fly. "Here's one right here, a couple of them." These young stay inside doing housework and tending the queen and new brood. They're generally quite docile. "Won't sting. You can touch them, you can herd them around. "

4:15

"The flying bees are the oldest ones in the hive and they also not only collect the nectar and pollen, but they also do guard duty. So they're the ones that are most likely to sting you." The flying bees bring back nectar in their bellies and pollen on their hind legs. Enzymes turn the nectar to honey, which they store in the comb.

4:35

"This is some old honey that's capped over already and here's the new honey that they're collecting, kind of glistening."

4:42

The pollen supplies protein. Adult bees need almost none so they only seek out pollen when there are young to feed.

4:50

"This colony is actually needing a little bit of room. The queen would have trouble finding a place to lay. So I'm gonna actually take a little bit out of this hive and give it some empty combs so that she has some room to move."
He moves the extra bees to a new hive that also has lots of room to grow. Plenty of eggs means young to feed and, therefore, active bees. "We're giving them not just bees that are just buzzing around, but we're giving them bees that need pollen and will go out and look for it and do the pollinating job in the orchard."

5:25

To make sure the bees can get through a spell of bad weather, he fills a reservoir with fructose. "Fifty-percent losses every winter is not acceptable to me. I can't accept that, whereas that's not uncommon in nature is for half the bees to die every winter. If it rains for four or five days, a hive in this condition, with as much brood as they have, could easily starve to death. We've made sure it has enough feed ... that the queen's in good condition ... you know this hive is in good condition to go into an orchard and do a good job of pollinating. So I can close it up and move on to the next one."

6:00

And George has a lot of next ones to maintain. About two thousand hives -- that's more than a hundred million bees.
"I don't have names for all of them."

6:12

And yes, he does sometimes get stung. Enough times that he no longer reacts to the venom. He does have some advice to avoid getting stung.

6:20

First, try to stay calm.
"The first reaction most people have when a bee comes around is to go like this ... and that's probably the very worst thing." Wearing light-colored clothing seems to help.
"White, smooth cotton is really the best, and the darker and fuzzier it is, the more it seems to attract aggressive behavior." And no one but a trained professional should ever disturb a colony. Bees are defensive. They sting when threatened. "Most people get stung when they bother a bee. But if you're working in your garden away from a hive and there are bees in your flowers and stuff like that, there's really not much danger."