Three happy groups of Biodx inhabitants have recently been successfully rehoused. They comprise of three separate bee colonies, each presided over by their queen bee.
The reason for their rehousing was simple – safety of workers but at the same time we need to keep the bees happy and healthy. The three groups originally lived near the garage by our product storage and inside the roofs of our raw material cold storage and production facilities. Once we discovered where the continuous buzzing sounds were coming from we called in a bee expert who assured us that it would be no problem for him to ‘kill all the bees’. That wasn’t what we had in mind.
The problem was one of the queen bees was lodged in a concrete slab, making it very difficult to get to her with another in the ceiling. Our instant reaction was to leave them – there would be no bee slaughter at Biodx.
When the late Joanne Oosthuizen, our partner and board member was alive and working with us at Biodx she’d often talk about the fact that the bee situation was critical worldwide and that we should be encouraging, not killing bees. This was another motivating factor for us to keep these bees alive. But that still left us with a housing problem as we felt they were a safety risk for our staff!
This is where ‘Beemovals’ came in and after a few tests they managed to recover all the queens, take them off site with the other bees so that when we moved their hives they wouldn’t be attracted to go back to their original locations.
Beemovals explained to us that we’d need to prepare an area for the bees so our own Chris Basson prepared an area where three new hives were installed. A week later our bees are back with brand new homes…