A humble bee-ginning ~ April 19. 2006

David Heiller

Cindy brought me a cup of coffee last Tuesday morning. I took a big swig. Oh, that first taste of coffee in the morning.

It was kind of a heavenly moment. Early morning. Three packages of bees. Fresh coffee.

It didn’t have a heavenly end, but what does?

In 2006, David had lots of bee experience, yet they remained mysterious. We were just starting to battle Colony Collapse Disorder. David never got a chance to get his bees going when we moved to Houston County.

I had set up my bee hives carefully, put in new foundation on the frames, filled the feeders with syrup to tide the critters over till the flowers sprout.

The bees had arrived the night before in three-pound boxes, roughly 10,000 bees per box. They formed a cone-like shape over a queen bee, who had already mated at her California home.

I opened the first package, removed the queen in her mini-cage, and covered the opening of the box so the other bees wouldn’t follow. The next sequence was to take out the little piece of cork that keeps the queen in her cage, replace it with some crystallized honey, hang her cage between two frames, staple it in place, dump the bees on top of her, put back three frames that had been removed, put the feeder on top, and put on the hive cover.

The other bees will free the queen by eating the honey, then she’ll get busy laying thousands of eggs. And the bee hive will begin in earnest in good old Brownsville, Minnesota. That’s by the book, although bees can’t read.

I carefully removed the cork as the queen turned tiny circles in her cage. She was anxious to go about her business. I plugged the hole with honey, hung her between frames, and picked up the box of bees. I was just about to shake them into the hive when the queen came out to greet me. The honey plug had fallen out! She stayed for a split second. If a bee could thumb her nose, that’s what she was doing. Then she flew away, followed by a few choice words from me. (They were about me, not her.)

I put the cover back on the package of bees. I would have to find a new queen somehow, which is not always an easy thing to do.

On to the second package. This time I stuffed the hole of the queen cage with a good, solid glob of honey. I placed her cage between the frames and decided not to staple it in place. I was in a hurry. I knocked the package of bees onto the top of the frames. That dislodged the queen cage. Darn it, it is supposed to hang between the frames! Now it was on the bottom of the hive, covered with bees. And did that dislodge the honey? Was she free? I quickly put the rest of the frames in the box, hoping I would not see another queen wave goodbye. I put on the feeder and the cover. Maybe all was OK.

The third package was textbook. Hung the queen, kept a finger over the honey plug, stapled her cage in place so it wouldn’t fall, dumped on her couriers, put on the feeder and hive cover.

It took three tries but I finally got it right. That’s life for me.

Three phone calls and four hours later, I had located a new queen. Only cost me $15. Not a bad price. I put her in the package with her new family that evening, so they could get used to each other. Bees will kill a queen if they don’t get used to her first. The next night she and the others went into their new home lickety-split. I was an expert by this point.

Bees are interesting creatures. They have a set of instincts that can humble us humans. They’ll find pollen and seal it up into cells of “bee bread.” When an egg hatches in three days, special nursemaids will eat the bee bread, convert it into food, and feed the larva for six days. Then they seal the cell. The larva transforms into a pupa, and in 12 days an adult bee chews her way out of the cell. They live a total of six weeks.

They’ll care for their queen, feed and groom her non-stop so she can lay up to 1,000 eggs a day. If they get tired of that queen, they have the ability to create a new queen by feeding larva special food they make called royal jelly.

They make propolis to seal and waterproof their hives. They use their wings and water to air condition a hive.

And best of all, they’ll gather nectar from flowers and blossoms and the fruits of Duane Thomford’s hard farming work. They’ll use their wings to evaporate the water in the nectar, then enzymes will change the nectar into honey. They’ll seal the honey into cells using beeswax, which comes from glands on the underside of the worker bee’s abdomen

Pretty amazing. Only bees can do it. We can put a man on the moon but we can’t make honey. Got to like that.

I’ll just stand back and watch, give them more frames when they need them, and try not to make too many more mistakes.

Mother Nature finally prevails ~ April 21, 2004

David Heiller

Fire almost always has the last word with me, It happened again on Saturday, although this time I had someone, or should I say Someone, looking over my shoulder.

The day started calmly enough. Four local fire fighters came out to help me burn the field south of the house. I had a permit for it from the Minnesota DNR office in Caledonia.

Our barn, the house and the field.

But the field was a bit too green and too wet to do much at 10:30 in the morning. We got a slow fire going, then the other people left. Valiree Green from the DNR, and Gary Meiners, the Brownsville Fire Department chief, said they would come back about 3:30.

During the day I watched the fire creep to the north, and kept it from going into the woods. The wind was from the north, so the fire couldn’t go anywhere. It was the perfect back-burn. And the ground was green and wet, remember?

At 3:30 Gary and Valiree came back, and we agreed the fire had burned about as much as we wanted it to. Valiree put out one smoldering log, and I said I would watch the other smoldering logs below the house. Valiree left a bladder bag full of water for me just in case. (A bladder bag is like a giant squirt gun that you wear on your back; it’s excellent for putting out grass fires.)

I looked over the fire line carefully. It was all out. I went into the house, changed out of my dirty fire clothes, and took a shower. As I stepped out of the house to head for Mom’s, the sight of smoke and crackle of flames hit me from the north field. The fire was burning again! The wind had switched to the south. Some spark probably blew into dry grass. Who knows?

I grabbed the bladder bag and started dousing the fire line near the ditch, which was full. of dead trees and tall reed canary grass. I got that part out, ran back to the house for more water, put out more fire, then went back for more water. After four trips, I had it out. I checked it, and checked it again. It was out. I was lucky.

I drove to Mom’s then, but stopped first to buy some eggs. When I got to Mom’s, she said Glenn, my brother, had just left to get me. Her mother instinct had kicked in and told her I was having trouble with the fire. I pooh-poohed that, and sat to wait for Glenn to return.

We waited. And waited. Finally the phone rang. Mom said a few words, then said in that mother voice that kids, even grown up ones, don’t like to hear, “Call the fire department. The fire is out of control!”

I called 9-1-1, then sped back home, worried and angry—at myself. When I got there, Glenn had the bladder bag on and was watching over a pile of rotten lumber that was burning in the ravine. He had put out flames at two other spots. Soon the firemen were back, and Valiree too. She gave me a look that was not too much different than the one my mother had given me. They doused the flames with about 1,000 gallons of water, and looked over the rest of the fields. The fire wasn’t going to go anywhere any more.

“But keep an eye on that pile,” Valiree told me before she left.

Sure enough, about an hour later, the old boards sprang back to life, and spread to a near-by rotten log. I was right there, so there was no danger to anything except my getting a good night’s sleep. I was looking at an all-night fire-sitting.

That’s when Mother Nature—or the Lord, I’m never sure which—had seen enough. She let forth a good soaking of rain and took care of that darn fire once and for all.

Did that rain look and feel and sound good! I said a silent prayer of thanks for it then, and relaxed for the first time all day. The experience was a good reminder to me that fire has a mind of its own. Don’t ever take your local fire fighters for granted either, or your big brother, or good old Mom and those instincts of hers.

Welcoming back the prodigal sun ~ April 27, 1994

by David Heiller

When you wait for something for a long time, the wait is usually worth it. That was the case last Saturday: like a starving person who stumbles onto a church potluck dinner. We’ve had the longest wait for spring that people can remember, and when spring finally hit on April 22, it hit hard and good.

Mother Nature had teased us with pseudo-spring early this year. The original snow pack melted in 60-degree weather in mid-March. But then we had 13 inches of snow on March 27, and two below zero weather on April 3, and snow on April eight, 12, 16, 18 (six inches) and 21. My wife grimly recorded this on the kitchen calendar.

So people were looking at Saturday’s sky like a prodigal sun, ready to forgive and rejoice and kill the fatted calf, or at least hold a potluck dinner.

I sensed it right away, when I saw the sun shining into the bedroom at 6:30. I was out in the woods by 7, pulling taps from the maple trees. Last year, which many people considered a late spring, we boiled our last sap on April eight. This year it was April 22.

From then on, it was non-stop spring chores: digging parsnips, putting plastic on the greenhouse, rearranging the garage, getting a load of pea rock from Stanley Bonk, fixing the hose in the basement, raking gravel off the lawn where the snow plow had deposited it like a glacier.

At first all these chores made me tense. There was so much to do. Where should I start? But as I went from task to task, it dawned on me that it didn’t really matter what I did. It all had to get done, and it all would get done sooner or later. The sun was shining. Why not just work and enjoy it? So I did.

Swing by your knees on the ladder?
Why not Spring finally sprung!

I guess it was work. My back tells me that. But I couldn’t have been more happy and relaxed.

And when I heard the frogs peeping for the first time, I knew it was officially spring. (Cindy happily writes the date we hear the frogs on our calendar. Last year was April 12; 1987 was April 8; 1991 was April 4.)

The kids sensed spring too. Normally on Saturday morning, they watch cartoons for a couple hours. But Malika, age nine, and her friend, Kristen, were out of the house by 9 a.m., and they didn’t go back in all day, except to change clothes.

First they were “old fashioned” women, dressed in long skirts and aprons and each carrying a little old fashioned baby. I tried to get them to help me with some old fashioned chores, like shoveling pea rock into the greenhouse, but they preferred to have a picnic lunch under the apple tree instead.

Then they changed into modern dresses. Then it was swimming suits. They sunbathed on towels and stuck their feet in the stock tank. It was a joy just watching them play.

Spring: it’s been a long wait, but boy are we glad you’ve finally made it.