If you’re heading from Winnipeg to the Rainy River district over the next few days, would you consider giving a lift to about a dozen single ladies looking to reach a new home where they can adopt tens of thousands of lonely offspring?
And these are no ordinary foster moms-to-be, but royalty: they’re queen honeybees, and they are destined to bring their built-in leadership skills to Spry Farm in La Vallee.
It’s not every day you see queen bees hitchhiking, but Spry Farm’s Leanne Spry has put out a call for a willing volunteer to be a bee Uber driver on Monday, Aug. 10.
“We have maybe a dozen or so queen bees that we order from a place just outside of Winnipeg,” Spry told The Times. “I could drive there and get them, but if somebody’s already coming from that way, then we’d love to have a ride for them.
Leanne and husband Tyler run The Spry Farm in Devlin, a local agritourism and small‑farm business offering dog training, a mobile petting zoo and local honey from their own beekeeping operation.
While they could breed their own queens, it’s a time-consuming process, and bringing in a few out-of-town megamoms is faster and more efficient, Leanne said.
“We can, but it just takes a lot longer than if we just order them, so just for the sake of time, we typically just order what we need when we need them,” She said.
“Anybody who’s beekeeping or selling beekeeping supplies usually is selling queens as well. This place in Winnipeg is about the closest that we can get live queens from without having to ship them from other places. You get quite a few losses when you get them from other places, because not all shipping firms are gentle with packages of live bees, or if they’re delayed, they don’t have enough food or water, so it’s nice to have a place that’s closer.”
They take up almost no space, and there are no special transport materials required, just a vehicle set to normal human temperature.
“You don’t want to set them out in the sun or anything like that in your vehicle. You’d want to just kind of like temperature controlled, like what you would be comfortable with.”
The bees won’t even need your company, Leanne says. Queens don’t travel alone.
“They’ve got an entourage. They come in a little box with a couple of worker bees, so it’s not going to take up a lot of space or anything like that.”
Beekeeping operations bring in new queens to keep colonies strong, productive, and healthy. Queens are the engine of the hive but only stay at peak fertility for one to two years, and when they falter, the whole colony declines. As their egg‑laying slows, the hive population drops, but a new queen restores brood production fast.
Occasionally, a hive will reject a new queen, driving her out or even killing her, but that is fairly rare, Leanne said.
“They can, but typically not. What we do is we put them in a hive that is already queenless, and then they want to adopt her pretty much right away, as is the way of the hive. Everyone needs a leader.”
Anyone willing to be a bee chauffeur can contact the Sprys on their Facebook Messenger, message Leanne at (807) 276-5466 or via email at thespryfarm@gmail.com.
