OXFORD, Ohio — Bees like locust trees, so when Don and Tracy Popp of Don Popp’s Honey Farm heard about a possible site for beehives near Hueston Woods State Park, they went to check it out. Don Popp found a cluster of locust trees and said it looked great.

The site was John Ittel’s Green Prairie Turf, Inc., a sod farm near the park with a nice stand of such trees and a good site for placing beehives. Popp bought the bees from a honey farm in Michigan last fall. But those bees were not yet on their way to Ohio.

“These bees were sent to California in the winter to pollinate the almond trees,” he explained. “Now they are done pollinating. They have to get them moved because the bloom is over, and they want to start spraying. So we have to bring them back, and they’re coming by semi truck.”

Ace X-Press, Inc. of Brandon, S.D., hauls bees all across the country, following the blooms of fruit trees, said owner Tracy Mittleider. “They go to California, then from California they could go to Mississippi or Georgia or Florida,” Mittleider said. “Some go from California to Maine.

“It’s a very big business. We’re just a small company, but we probably do three-quarters of a million (dollars) a year.”

Ace X-Press puts nets over the beehives, and the drivers wear bee suits with veils and gloves, Mittleider said. The average load is 450 hives. The drivers keep moving during the day and do whatever needs to be done when they stop at night – cold doesn’t bother the bees, but heat is hard on them.

“If you break down in the heat of the day you have to try to water them, like with a garden hose,” Mittleider explained. “Sometimes you have to get the fire department out there to spray them down. Otherwise they come out of the boxes, or they get too hot and they die.”

“So, last night a semi pulled in with 500 beehives,” said Ittel, who always had an interest in bees but never had hives before. “The bees were getting mad; they stung the truck driver two or three times, got in his hair. He kept trying to run everybody off because he thought we were going to get stung.”

Jeff, Ittel’s son, unloaded the hives with a JCB loader. An enclosed cab protected him from the angry bees. He placed the hives in a long row, with four hives to a pallet. The Ittels were keeping five hives of bees.

Popp would spend the following days delivering a few at a time of the remaining hives to the 36 different farms within about a 50-mile area where he rents space for the hives. He pays Ittel rent in honey.

“When you bring these bees back from California, and they have been out there in that warm weather, they are at least one month ahead of the bees we have here,” Popp pointed out. “These bees have built up real strong.

“I can make additional hives from them, plus they will make a lot of honey this spring because they are advanced. First things they will be working are clover and dandelion, and then locust trees.”

Next winter those bees will be heading back to California. Popp will have to pay for their transportation, but the almond growers will in turn pay to rent the bees. “The rent more than pays your expenses,” he said. “The almond growers have to have bees.”