Thank you very much. You're very kind. I'll be brief.

The plan was, load the hives, start around six or seven o'clock in the evening, be on the road by eight o'clock, get to Sicamous, try to get six hours of sleep in, refuel, and then make the jump from Sicamous back to Stettler, which is under that 12-hour mark.

The way it actually went is that we started loading the bees at the time we said, but because of the rains and the snowmelt, the river in Keremeos was flooding, and in the farmer's field where the bees were, the river water came up high enough that it was blocking our egress out of the field. The beekeeper had to get all of his hives out of that field or else he wouldn't be able to get into them, so we had to load three trucks that night: a drop-deck; my truck, which is a tandem axle with a 32-foot deck on the back; and then another truck as well.

We got them all loaded, but when we tried to leave, the drop-deck tractor-trailer unit got stuck in the mud that was created by the river flowing through the field, and we were stuck there until three o'clock in the morning waiting for a trackhoe to come and pull us all out. That's how we finally got out.

At three o'clock in the morning, now I'm way behind. I'm still in Keremeos. I don't have the option of unloading my truck again, because then I have to wait until the next night to reload again to keep going. It wasn't likely that the river was going down, so I got up, got out of the field, drove down the road a little ways to the first gas station I could come to, refuelled, slept in my truck for an hour and a half, and then hit the road.

On the way home, we hit construction in the Kicking Horse Pass, but because I had bees on the back, I stopped about half a mile back behind the rest of the cars and turned my flashers on. I ran to the front of the line. I can't be stopped on the side of the road for very long because I'm going to have a cloud of bees flying around, and for anyone who has their windows open, there's a high probability they're going to get stung. There's 10% of the population who will go into an anaphylactic reaction if they get stung by bees.

The construction company realized that, so they radioed in and they gave me special permission to drive through the construction zone, passing all the other traffic that was stopped there.

For a well-planned trip, what should have been well within the requirements for hours of operation, I ended up putting in a 16-hour day to finally get home back to Stettler. It's not fun.

Again, the point is that we're hauling bees. I only do three or four runs like that a year. I can have a log in my truck, but for three or four runs.... The rest of it is all under provincial guidelines. The danger is not necessarily just the tired driver; there are other dangers and other things that need to be taken into consideration when you're looking at hours of service.

With the bees, we have to take into consideration that when we're driving, even if our loads are netted, we have escapes. What's going to happen when you stop for even two or three minutes during daylight hours? What other dangers are we going to present to the travelling public?

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