So my name is Ted McFall. I live in the Pacific Northwest, Northern Washington. And I am a hobby

beatkeeper. I've been a beekeeper my whole life. I grew up in a beekeeping family. My father's kept

bees. And so I'm very familiar with all things related to bees. So on a typical day of beekeeping,

I'll usually wait until around midday. Well, what I'll do is I'll just open up the hive. I'll

puff them with some smoke, which calms them down. And then I just go through the hive and see

what each individual colony needs. Whenever they're cranky, sometimes I talk to them and they're

trying to sting me out. And I do, I talk to them, I say, hey, what's going on? So why are you so upset?

Say, hey, you know, is your queen doing okay? Is your queen here? Because sometimes the queen

gets sick or somebody having to look queen and that makes them cranky. Or I'm like, you know, is

a predator missing with you guys? Or you know, basically I talk to them. I know that they don't

understand what I'm saying. So I got to really, it's more of talking to myself. Yeah, and it's kind

of funny whenever I'm going through the hive because a lot of times I do see all their little,

their little eyes all lined up along the top bars staring at me. So sometimes I do feel like I

have thousands of eyes staring at me at once whenever I'm going through their home. I know that

maybe that's a little bit of a, some kind of romanticized idea of beekeeping, but I feel like

maybe they just kind of recognize me and they know all the case. Just to see I get.

So one morning in November of last year in northern Washington state, Ted McFaul gets out of

the bed and he's going to go check on his hives. It was a typical morning. I made something to eat. I

got down my stuff together and I was just planning to like go do a typical hiving inspection.

So I went and I got my smoker and my bee equipment, my bee suit, then I put everything in my

pickup truck and I went to the B yard and as I drove into the B yard, I could see from afar

kind of a dark shadow in front of one of my beehives and I thought oh, I wonder what that is.

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