Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

by David Heiller The mystery of spring has struck, and all the explanations in the world won’t stop me from gawking. Sweet, sweet mystery of Spring! Take those maple trees. We drilled 43 holes and hammered in aluminum taps on March 11, right at the start of a warm spell. Eighteen inches of snow carpeted the woods that Saturday, and three days later, the carpet was threadbare. That in itself mystified a lot of people. It was the talk of the town. “What happened to the snow? How could so much snow disappear so fast?” But maple trees offer a bigger mystery. You’d think when the warm weather hit, the sap would have flowed fast and filled our buckets. That didn’t happen. The sap didn’t run at all during that warm spell, when it was 60 during the day and 40 at night. Jim Sales, a friend from Askov who used to tend the maple trees at Audubon Center of the North Woods in Sandstone, told me why: the trees need cold nights to go with the warm days. The cold nights tell ...

David Heiller Bees are a small part of my life, but one that I like. They only sting when they are mad. They are like people in that way. I have one hive of bees. That isn’t much, even though a hive can contain 80,000 bees. A few of them stung me on Sunday when I took half of their honey away. I couldn’t blame them. I was late in taking the honey, as Nick Worobel pointed out on September 21. He was a master beekeeper in his day, first in Ukraine then in rural Bruno. Now he lives in the big city of Sandstone. When I told him I was going to take the honey on Sunday, a wistful look flickered across his face and he smiled. “Make sure you feed the bees when you are done,” he said, after reminding me that I was about a month late in my job. “Mix half sugar and half water and set it on top of hive. They like that.” Good old Nick will be giving bee advice on his deathbed, which hopefully will be many years away. One of David's beekeeping chores. This is a  spring job...

David Heiller The hum from the bee hive rose to a roar as I lifted the lid off and puffed them with smoke. A stiff breeze swirled through the trees. Don’t work with bees on a windy day, the bee books say, but bees never could read very well. David and the hives . Besides, it was October 2, and I was about one month late in doing this job. Wind or no wind, I was going to take that honey. I squeezed the bellows of the smoker, sending more thick smoke down into the hive. The bees buzzed their disapproval, but most of them retreated into the hive. Smoke confuses them and sends them running to protect their queen. I couldn’t blame the bees for grumbling. They had worked hard for that extra box of honey. I lifted nine frames from the box on top. I used a hive tool, which is like a small crowbar, and a gripping tool to pry out each frame. They didn’t come out easily. In addition to weighing a couple pounds, each one was glued into place by bee glue, otherwise known as propo...

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 Last Saturday I went out to my one bee hive to take their honey. I started the year out with three hives, but two of them died in a cold spell in late April. That was a sign of things to come. Before I went to the honey bees last week, I made a side trip to a nest of yellow jackets. I discovered them when I was moving an old brush pile about a month ago. They came bub­bling out of the ground so fast I literally ran away. Bees are a lot of work, especially in a bad year. But with my bee suit on and a spade in hand, I dug them up on Saturday morning without a sting. I found their eggs and squished them between my fingers, and found the queen and squished her too, and I hate to admit it but it felt good. We play God all the time. It’s just more noticeable with bees and wasps. It must be man’s baser nature that if it’s a threat to people, it has a lesser value. Those yellow jackets pollinate flowers and vegetables and apple trees just like the honey bees. They...

David Heiller The bees were first to welcome me home from vacation last week. They were buzzing so loudly on Thursday morning that I could hear them from 30 yards away. The air around one hive was a blizzard of bees. They were swarming; half the hive was following the queen in search of a new home. Jeez, leave for a week and a queen gets upset at you. The nerve! One angry chap even stung me by my left eye, which swelled shut long enough for Cindy to take this photo. The standing head for David's column looked a little different that week. An hour later, I returned to the hive. All was quiet again. I walked through the field and spotted a ball of bees hanging from the limb of a willow tree. That’s where the queen had landed to get her bearings. What a sight. There’s nothing as exciting as watching a swarm of bees, 40,000 strong, the size of your thigh, all huddled on top of one another, shimmering, humming, moving as one. (It’s also exciting to a penny-pinching German ...

David Heiller The bees are in the mail. Weaver Apiaries in Navasota, Texas, shipped them out on Monday. Later this week the phone will ring and postmaster Kathy Weulander will say in a voice that is not quite trembling, “Hi, Dave, your bees are here, would you come and get them, PLEASE!” This is how bees are mailed. David always got an  EARLY morning call when they arrived. Sometimes the call came the night before, from the mail sorting center. Everyone seems to get kind of nervous! The bees come in screened containers about the size and shape of a large shoe box. They look like a giant, buzzing ball. Somewhere in the middle is their love and hope and future — their queen. Kathy doesn’t have to worry in the presence of queens like that. Even when some of the bees get out of their container. That’s because they could care less about Kathy Weulander and David Heiller. No, any escapees will cling to the side of that screened box, from Texas and Oklahoma to Missouri and...