Riding Road Graders and Sleds- Mimosa Lake, NJ, 1960’s
When I was little, we lived on a one lane, white sandy road in the Pine Barrens named for my family as Watson’s Way. It looped around the back side of our small lake, through the Piney woods and scrub oaks, eventually joining with another road to form a figure eight around two lakes. Towards the end of summer each year, the little one lane track would get all humped up with sand in the middle, with the wheel tracks lower on each side. It had to be scraped down and leveled or the cars would drag bottom and get stuck in the soft sand. The curves were especially tricky to maneuver when the sand got deep. Flooring the gas was not at all helpful, it just dug you in deeper. For some reason, the Mayor of the township was the guy who would come out to grade it. I have never known why it was him that came out, as he didn’t live nearby. Maybe he was a land owner or something. He lived way off in town in a huge old farm house and held a big community Easter Egg Hunt there each year.
We learned to ride our bikes on that sandy road, which wasn’t easy, but the falling wasn’t too bad in the soft sand. Way better than falling on gravel or black top. We played Wiffle ball in the middle of the road too, as there was hardly ever any cars besides ours on it. Our bikes had fat tires and no gears back then, with the old style back pedaling brakes. After it rained, the sand was firmer, darker colored and easier to ride on. When the weather had been really dry for a while though, it was almost impossible to pedal fast enough to stay upright. My mom had to carry a shovel in the back of the car in case we needed to dig ourselves out. Old floor mats came in handy too.
So, when the center hump got to too high, Eeph (short for Ephraim) would come out on his old tractor pulling a box grader/ scraper. This was not like a highway department grader blade but more like a giant box type cheese grater. The blade on the bottom would scrape up the sand and it would rise up in the open topped box, the pile growing higher and higher, as he traveled on down the road. When it would get so high it started spilling, he would drive it to some low area or a washed out place nearby and tip it out. It was fascinating to watch but the best times were when he let us sit on top of the pile as it grew. I don’t think this was something I ever mentioned to my parents, and I can’t imagine they would have approved, but it sure was fun.
Another dubiously safe pastime was when Dad would hook the toboggan up to the back of the station wagon and pull all four of us kids down the road in the snow. He’d be fishtailing and we’d be yelling for him to go faster and slinging ourselves off on purpose. It was a blast. Come to think of it, Jeff was game for this kind of thing back in the 90’s when he pulled about twelve of us uphill on sleds behind his Isuzu. It was our annual Presidents Day weekend caving trip out in Franklin, WV. There was a good snow on the ground so we had all brought our sleds. The first sled in line was tied to the car with a rope, and the rest were all holding on to the bent up legs of the person in front of us. We whip snaked up that forest service road way faster than we ever slid down it. He’d pull us up, we’d sled down, he’d pull us back up again. That was even more fun than the toboggan and we were mostly all in our thirty’s and forties then. Well, except for Ackie, who was probably in his sixties at least. He rode his sled down the hill sitting upright like the Norelco shaver commercial on TV at Christmas. You have to be ready to enjoy whatever fun comes along.
The toothless old horse trader told us down at the stock sale, “She’s a good working mule, not a day over 14 years.”
Well, we knew better than to believe that, but she looked fine to us anyway. We hemmed and hawed awhile, asked about throwing in the harness, maybe a single tree, her halter. We managed to get him down to $300 for the whole mess, and got her delivered to our place for free besides. It wasn’t our first time dealing with the cranky old so and so. The stock pens were right next to the feed store where we spent a fair amount of time hanging out talking to Brooks Fleming, the owner. He was full of useful information about farming, weather, putting food by, training border collies and such. Brooks was up in his eighties then and didn’t seem to mind sharing his experience with us newbie’s at all. Eck worked there part time unloading train cars of feed when they came in and we bought all our feed from him.
We tried not to wander on down to the stock pens too much because we always felt sorry for the horses down there. Some of them had welts from being whipped and most of them were underfed and skittish. They got them cheap at farm and stock auctions and sold them for whatever profit they could get. We had already bought Barney, the donkey, and Daniel, the pinto pony from them the year before. Let’s just say they were much better off with us. Barney and Daniel weren’t all that useful but they weren’t much trouble either. We had plenty of grass and it didn’t take much of a fence to keep them in.
I rode Daniel bareback all through the woods and over the hill to visit
Daniel in his work harness
friends even though I don’t think he was ever really trained for riding. He had a harness, and was supposed to be a work pony, but he wasn’t all that big so he couldn’t haul a lot of weight. He was very good at hauling one log at a time down from the top of the hill though. We would walk him up, back him up to the log, hook the chain to the single tree, and I would walk him down for the first trip. Once we got down to the bottom and unhooked him, all I had to do was get him headed in the right direction, smack his rump and tell him to go on back up for another, and he’d go plodding off up the hill. Then he’d get another log hooked on and come on back on his own. It didn’t take long to wear him out though. It was a pretty steep hill and the logs were heavy. Then he’d just quit.
So we decided to buy a work mule when we saw Kate down at the stock pens. She was a whole lot bigger than Daniel and had a history of pulling logs. So he said, anyway. She was a good tempered mare mule, about 15 hands tall and 1200 pounds, and got along with Barney and Daniel just fine. Her harness was beautiful, with brass knobs, red and white trimmings, in decent shape. Eck could ride her without worrying about her running off with him, and she was more comfortable bareback than Barney, who was kind of small anyway.
During the next few months Kate worked out pretty well, hauling
Kate
logs for us and letting us ride her. One day, we rode her and Daniel up to our new house site and tethered them loosely to some trees nearby while we were working. The dogs, Geshen and Possum, came up with us, always staying about forty feet ahead, and looking back to see we were still coming along. They got bored when we stopped, so they kept on up the hill and ran into some deer, which they commenced to chase back down the hill, right into the horses. Kate and Daniel startled and yanked back on their ties, which gave way, and they headed off downhill, cross country. Daniel knew where he was going and he moved a lot faster than Kate and was soon out of sight. Kate was trying to follow him but didn’t keep up too well. We tried to head them off but Daniel was gone and headed home. We saw him at a distance, cross the creek at the neighbor’s car crossing, and head down the county road to the barn. Then we saw Kate. She didn’t see where Daniel crossed and she tried to take a shortcut. It was a really bad choice. Over on Tessie’s place the oil well sits right at a bend in the creek, with a low marshy area on the far side and a steep clay bank about four foot high on the other. She hesitated, we were shouting at her to WHOA, but she jumped anyway. Her front legs made it but her back legs got stuck in the mud and, in slow motion, she fell over backward in the creek. We finally got caught up to her and she was thrashing around trying to get herself upright. Panic was in her eyes, with the whites showing all around, breathing hard. We tried to calm her down, talking and patting her down. She finally got her legs under her but they all four sunk in deep mud. There seemed to be no bottom to it. It was like quicksand. Every time she moved she got deeper. Then it started to rain. Hard.
Bunnels Run is a creek famous for flooding very fast, and it had been raining a lot lately. The red clay ground was totally saturated. Any more rain was going to just run right off into the creek. There was seven miles of creek above us and it came through town first. That means a lot of rooftop and parking lot runoff water headed our way. We got down in the creek and were pulling and pushing and digging trying to get Kate loose. She would thrash around, panic, go still, thrash some more. She just kept getting deeper in. Eck finally ran off to call for help, get a rope and bring the tractor to pull with. He managed to get a few neighbors to help, too. We scrambled back down in the mud to get the rope around her middle and tied off to the tractor and started pulling with that. Kate freaked out when the rope started to pull and rub on her and we tried padding it with shirts. Somebody was beating on her but to get her moving, while we were cajoling her with pleas to try, but she finally just rolled her eyes up in her head and gave up entirely. The rain was coming down hard all this time and creek was starting to rise. Her head was stretched far out on the mud, not moving. We got shovels and started digging frantically; trying to make a hole in the mud and get the suction broke, pulling with the tractor, digging some more, pushing from behind, lifting her legs. Nothing was working. Another neighbor showed up with a second tractor, got it rigged up and both were pulling at once, slipping in the mud. The rain continued to pour down. Finally she started to break loose from the mud with a sucking noise and we all jumped in and worked together to bring her out. We got her pulled a little ways to a solid spot but Kate was not able to stand. We started rubbing her legs down, feeling for broken bones, and realizing she had lost her circulation in them, massaged the blood flow back into them. She started to try and stand up and with all of us helping she finally was standing again. Her head was hanging down low, though, and she seemed to have lost her will to fight. We got her moving, walking real slow, and looking back, could see the water was already up about a foot and rising fast. She would have drowned in another few minutes. It took us almost half an hour to get her back to the barn and rubbed down. We tried to feed her and gave her water but she didn’t want it. The goats and Daniel and Barney all stood close by looking worried and did not leave her side for days.
Poor old Kate never did fully recover from that ordeal. She wouldn’t eat, didn’t pay anyone any attention, and just started to waste away. I think she aged 15 years in one day and she lost the will to live. Her hooves developed a soft depression ring and started to peel. It hurt her to even stand. We didn’t know what to do to help her. We found a guy who thought he could nurse her back to health and we gave her to him about a month later. When he loaded her up in the truck, she swung her head down low, back and forth, like a vision of Dumbo the Elephant going to slaughter. It made us cry. We felt terrible. She bellowed as he pulled away and we went inside and sobbed. We heard she died not long after.
My history with bees is not the greatest. I originally got started
Two New Bee Hives
through helping my neighbor, Harry, with his bees back when I lived near Harrisville, WV in the 1970’s. I mostly helped him with taking the honey at the end of the season and jarring it up. I made the best beeswax candles from the cappings. They smelled so good when you burned them and lasted a long time. We were able to just run into town, about 8 miles away, to the old Stout family hardware store and get everything we needed for bee keeping. Veils, long gloves, hive bodies, wax foundation and frames, feeders, everything. Some of their stock might be 30 years old but you knew it was in there some place if you had the time to look. Also, if it was a rainy, nasty day the younger brother would let you have stuff for next to nothing, or the price that was marked on it from the 1940’s. Rainy days depressed him. They tended to depress me too and I tried not to take advantage.
I got my own bees after awhile but then I lost one hive to bears- thanks to the DNR for reintroducing them to our area, and then one to foul brood, and I backed off from beekeeping until I moved to Freshwater Cove in Nelson County Va. My partner at the time brought me a present one day of a bee hive that was so mean, that when a bear got into them and turned the whole thing over, the bees actually won the fight. I think he was hoping they would get me too. They stung me every chance they got- even while wearing a protective veil. The last time I went near them I was pregnant with my youngest daughter and they somehow managed to get under the veil and sting me on my neck about 20 times. I think this might be why she was sensitive to insect stings for the first few years of her life. I am not sure what later killed those bees but I was glad to see their demise as they were the meanest bees I had ever encountered.
When I moved to Shepherdstown, I no longer had any bee equipment except a couple of old smokers and a hive tool- no veil or gloves or hive bodies hanging around. I discovered about ten years ago just how hard it is here, to get a hold of an empty beehive when you need one in a hurry. We had a hardware store and a Southern States then but neither one kept bee supplies in stock. So, why did I need a hive all of a sudden when I had no bees? Well, a friend had some construction going on at his house, so he brought his hive over to visit with us for a while as the bees were placed too close for comfort. You cannot move bees a short distance without confusing them as to where home is. The old adage is ‘Three feet or three miles’. They needed to go more than three feet so they came about ten miles to our place until they were done building. When they arrived, my apple trees were in full bloom, along with lots of nut trees and such, so they were quite happy. Anyway, maybe they made so much honey they ran out of room. No one brought them a super to expand with and so they swarmed. A whole bunch of the bees took off with the queen and landed about 20 feet away, on a young apple tree, right about eye level. They were only going to hang out there for so long, until the scout bees found them a new home in a hollow tree or something, and they had to be gathered up quick or lost. I knew that much but not much else.
I called the bees owner at home, hoping he would be around, but of course he was not and neither was his son. They had not shown much interest in the bees since they dropped them off weeks before. So I ran down to the hardware store to see if anyone there knew any beekeepers but the only one who knew anything was off somewhere. A woman shopping for paint gave me the number of a beekeeper nearby in Maryland who offered to come take away the swarm for himself. Fat chance, they are expensive to buy and I did not want to waste them. He would have sold me an empty hive, except his were an unusual size, and I would never be able to get parts for them. So I went over to the feed store to see if they knew of anyone who kept bees and might have an extra hive laying about and they put me on the phone to a local orchardist. The woman who answered said her husband was out in his bee yard trying to catch a swarm right then (obviously a good day for swarms) but she would have him call me back as soon as he came in.
Meanwhile, I was frantically reading my old beekeeping book, trying to come up with alternative bee boxes. They have to be something fairly strong as this group of bees probably weighed 9-12 pounds and they would be hanging from the top of the box. Cardboard would collapse. I was rigging a 20 gallon plastic tree bucket with bamboo stakes stuck through it and trying to figure out how to get them to go into it, when the beekeeping orchardist called back. He was full of useful information and gave me confidence that I could get these bees caught without a problem. I was out talking to him on my cell phone, with the bees clustered around, when the original owner and his cousin finally drove up with a hive body, just in time. Thank goodness they also brought some veils and long gloves. Those are nice. Actually they are more like a necessity most of the time. The pair had very little experience, it turns out, and they were not looking at all enthusiastic, but I convinced them it would not be a problem and it wasn’t. Really it was a lot of fun. The bees behaved as if they were connected in a long rope, moving as one unit, about two and a half feet long and 8 inches wide, wrapped around a branch of the young tree. I placed their new hive, with frames of wax foundation hanging in it, on the ground below the swarm and we shook the branch. The bees all just dropped right in. They started to get a little stirred up and buzzed around us some, but they settled down pretty quick. It was neat to watch and hear them drop – kind of like hearing a few pounds of mini marshmallows fall on the kitchen floor. Not that I have ever heard that. We took a soft brush and made sure there weren’t any missed bees still up on the branch and then the guys went on their way. I stayed out there awhile until almost dark, put the top on after they all clustered back together, and moved them back over next to the other hive Then I took the lid back off, added another empty super box, and set up a feeding station with a jar of sugar water, so they would feel at home and have enough energy to draw out the new comb they needed. Unfortunately, the first hive swarmed again a couple of weeks later, and since we had no more hives for them, I gave them away to the orchardist neighbor, who had been so helpful. That winter, the snow drifted so deep I think my visiting bees suffocated and died. I felt terrible and asked the guys to take their boxes away.
Setting up the frames and feeders
I am not sure why I have decided to get bees again except that I feel a need to produce at least a portion of the food we eat. I have always kept chickens, grown a big garden and put a lot of food up each year. Luckily, on my third go round with bees, there is internet shopping with UPS delivery right to the porch. My new bee Guru, who has fifty hives and tends bees with his elderly father, told me where he gets his supplies online, so I did some research and ordered mine from the same place http://www.mannlakeltd.com/ . The two complete hives, each with two bodies and two supers, arrived in four large awkward size boxes right on time. I felt kind of sorry for the UPS man. Since I made the decision to get bees late in the season, it was hard to find a source of the actual bees for delivery this spring. When I did finally find some package bees that originated here on the East Coast (for better acclimatization, less shipping time) they were Russian and Italians from http://spillehoney.com/bees.html.
Three pounds of mailorder Bees in their cage
The night before I expected them to arrive, I made up a few gallons of sugar syrup to feed them with so it could have time to cool. The bees arrived in good shape in two shoe box sized screened in boxes at the post office at 6:30 am the next morning. The Post Mistress called my cell to come get them, and since I was already at work, I had to turn around and come back and install them in their new hives, which only took about an hour, plus another hour and a half of travel. I had heard that the Italians were the most gentle but it was one of that lot that stung me and they seemed more riled up than the Russians.
Checking for the Queens ReleaseThe Queens cage-empty
I wore my gnat veil, a pair of leather gloves and a nylon raincoat with a hood, Velcro sleeves and a draw cord hem. That one bee got me on my ankle. Four days later, when I removed the separate little Queen boxes I had hung in the center of the hive, and made sure she was released, I added duct tape to my outfit around my ankles. The worker bees have to work to get her out of her cage, which comes plugged with candy at one end. That gives the bees about four days to get acquainted with each other before she is free. If you release a new queen right away they might kill her. I have had the bees a week now and have refilled their feeders with another gallon each. So far, each hive has been busy building out comb but they have not made it out to the furthest frames yet. When they do, I will add another hive body and move the feeder up a level. When that gets full, I will add a super (a shallower box with frames and foundation) one at a time as they need it. I have an entrance reducer in place so they can defend against robber bees but as soon as this cold rain ends I think I will give them a larger front door so they can forage easier.
The Wild Cherries are in full bloom and I have planted buckwheat for later in the season. I may plant more of that. We don’t need all this lawn. The buttercups I don’t want out in the back pasture are also in full bloom. I might till them up as soon as they are done and plant some clover and orchard grass, which Mara, my horse will also like. The neighbor across the way has removed the cows from fifty acres and is about to plant it in corn. Round Up ready corn of course, which is what everybody plants these days. I was glad they killed the grass more than a week before I got my bees. If they had sprayed it when the clover was blooming and the bees were working it, it would have killed them. Luckily, they now have a beekeeper maintaining two hives on their farm on shares, who will be as worried as I am, and hopefully will help them prevent such things.
I am starting to remember how much work it takes to take proper care of bees and hope I can keep up properly. On Monday morning, before work, I will need to see if I can find the queens and make sure she is starting to lay eggs. If not I may have to order a new queen. I have never been good at locating the queen and probably should have had her marked. I will have to meet with the farmers on both sides of us and ask them to keep me informed and meet the couple doing the bees over there. There is a lot to learn. Rosie, my bee guru at work, is full of information and loves to talk bees so he will be a big help. There is also a local beekeeping group that meets once a month so I plan to hook up with them. All I need now is more hours in the day.
