Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

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 tak...

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....

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 sp...