Fun in the Country!

I saw something funny the other day.

In this area, there are two big operations - farmers who raise chickens in their big long chicken houses for Tyson, and farmers who raise cattle (presumably for hamburger and steak). It is important to know that for the purposes of this story.

Recently, I had gone into town in the car. Coming back from town on the dirt and gravel lane that the county confers with the lofty title of "County Road", I came across the trail of little digested black squishy stuff that I identified as cow pies. Did you know that cow pies look different from horse dookie? Some of our neighbors own horses and sometimes ride them up and down the roads. Thus I have experience with both. The trail of cow pies began next to the property of a neighbor who owns cattle.

Driving further down the road, I came across a farmer in his truck coming my way. Behind his truck he was hauling a trailer. In the trailer was a small bale of hay.

The next thing I came across was a cow coming my way. The cow was in the process of chewing on a mouthful of hay, her mouth moving side to side in the comical fashion used by cows in their first round of eating and digestion. I wish there was a way to describe the look on the cow's face when she saw me. I don't know who was more confused and amused, me or her.

Using the logic I gained from years of college education, I deduced that the cow had escaped the confines of the farmer's property.

The farmer, being the smart guy he was, developed a plan to lure they cow back. His wonderful plan included loading some hay into the trailer, going to the cow, then allowing the cow a mouthful of hay. The farmer would then move the truck and trailer and hay a little closer back to his farm, wait for the cow to move up to the trailer to take another mouthful of hay. The farmer would then do this as many times as it took, until the cow was finally back on his property. The farmer appeared to be in no hurry, filled with much patience. The cow seemed to be in no hurry either.

Being the impatient city slicker I am, I'd have probably started hitting the cow at some point. I am trying to learn things from the farmers around here. Maybe by the time I retire, I'd be able to do what I saw that farmer doing.

Autumn Again in the Ozarks

It is autumn again. Nights are getting chilly. Skies are clearer in the daytime. The sound of crunching leaves underneath our feet signals the changes all around us.

One of the benefits of a home office is the ability to be aware of what is going on around you.

This afternoon, a buck and a doe where feeding in the front yard, out past the garden. I got some pictures of the buck, but the doe was hidden behind the garden fence, so I got none of her.

It is interesting to note the musculature on the buck, the thick neck, the head held high as he surveys all around him. It is also interesting to note how the light tan of the fur has turned a much darker color for the fall.

The fur on the squirrels, too, has changed to a darker color.

These are things never noticed while living in the big city surrounded by roads and highways and interstates and noise.

Yes, this will be a great place to retire.

The sun will come out tomorrow

Orphan Annie was right. The sun will come out tomorrow.

Here in the Ozarks, we got our power back Tuesday afternoon, so are back at home after a brief stay at an internet-connected motel Tuesday during the day (so we could continue to "work from home").

I was able to work from home on Monday by using my UPS battery backup to keep the satellite internet connected and running on my laptop battery.

After the power went out, I was able to get thirty or forty gallons of water from the pressure tank (we are on a well) before the pressure ran out; however, we still did not have enough water for the three days we were without power.

On Sunday morning after the storm had passed, our daughter and son-in-law, three-tenths of a mile down the road from us, discovered two trees at the end of their driveways, one on each side, keeping them from "escaping" in their vehicles. We spent a portion of the day helping them cut up and clear out one of the trees so they could get out in at least one of the directions. The county came out later in the day to clean up all the downed tress crossing the road.

Between Sunday and Tuesday, I learned to bathe in 1 inch of water, and felt how refreshing a shower could be using one of those camp-shower bags. We cook with gas, so we were able to have hot water and hot meals. We had to haul water from our daughter's swimming pool to flush.

I think we would have been better prepared had NOAA said we'd have winds up to 60mph. However, all they mentioned was flood warnings. We knew winds that bad would cause a power outage, but did not know until it was too late.

We used a hurricane lantern, flashlights, candles, and those light sticks for light. Of all of those, only the lantern produced enough light. So we went to Walmart and purchased a battery-powered lantern and a rechargeable lantern as well as some more containers in which to store water. The light sticks came in handy at night. I'd start up three or four of them and place them in various places throughout the house in case we got up at night.

Other than having to throw out 80% of what was in the refrigerator and having a 100-foot tall pine tree (see picture below) arm-wrestling with a 90-foot tall oak tree in our back yard (we counted almost six dozen trees downed in domino-fashion in the 1/3 mile between our house and our daughter's house), we are none the worse for wear. The people in Texas still have it worse.

Of course, Of course

We've seen all kinds of wildlife roaming through our yard in the two years we've lived here. Today was a first. I don't think these were wild animals. They grazed for about an hour and then went on their merry way.








A horse is a horse, of course, of course.

I talked to these horses and they could not tell me where they lived.

Lunch Guests

This afternoon, we saw five deer grazing on the bushes and trees behind the house. Better that than them grazing on our fruit trees out front in our "orchard". One of the deer had little buds where the antlers will eventually be.

And then, this evening, a buck showed up.

An electric day in Mayberryville!

Wednesday morning, July 9, around 1:30am, we were awakened by a loud thunderclap and a bright slash of lightning. The power went out momentarily, then came back on. When it came back on, the UPS unit that we have some of our computer equipment hooked up to began sounding an alarm. I tried turning it off, but the alarm kept sounding. I tried unplugging it, but the alarm kept sounding. The only way I could get the alarm to stop was by opening it up and disconnecting the battery.

We finally went back to bed and slept until 6am.

I found other places to plug in the equipment - albeit not all of it surge-supressed and battery-backedup. It was then I discovered the horrible fact that the modem for our satellite internet had been fried.

This led to a long conversation with a help-desk Indian named Kevin, and his supervisor named David Smith. Names notwithstanding, I knew where they were by their accents and the Indian music that played while I was on hold.

The conversation boiled down to me trying to figure out why they would not let me pay actual money to expedite the shipping of a new modem. Money did not mean anything to Kevin or his supervisor David Smith. There was no way I could get the modem before five to seven days later.... unless....

Unless I was willing to sign up for the two-day repair service for only $5.95 more per month, plus a $99 co-pay since I was having to use the service before the thirty-day pre-existing period expired.

Okay, they were working from a script and nothing I said would convince them otherwise. Added to the fact I NEEDED the modem TODAY and not a week later, I signed up.

I asked, "So the modem will arrive at my house by Friday, right?"

Things do not work that way. If I had not signed up, they could have sent the modem directly to me. Since I signed up, they could send the modem only to a contracted technician in my area, who would then have to bring it to me and set it up.

It is Thursday as I write this, and I have yet to hear from the technician as to what time tomorrow he will be out here. (PS - When the tech came out, it took him from 9am until 4pm to get the modem working and a good signal)

After that, I fired up my laptop and it would not boot up. It went into a cycle of having to check the integrity of the disk drive, then the BOSD (Blue Screen of Death), followed by another check disk, followed by another BSOD. Some times I was able to boot into the safe mode, some times not. Some times I could see some kind of error message that seemed to indicate trouble with the ethernet card.

So, that taken care of, I went to take my shower. Turned the faucet on - NO WATER! What the heck happened?

The song from Oklahoma ran through my brain... Oh what a beautiful morning! Oh what a beautiful day! I've got a horrible feeling...

We are on a well. I checked the switch box for the house and all the circuit breakers were okay. I turned the one for the pump on and off just to make sure.

There are two other boxes in the utility room next to the pressure tank. I opened the first one and saw two blown fuses. "No trouble," I thought. I turned off the power, replaced the fuses, turned the power back on and THE TWO FUSES BLEW IMMEDIATELY!

My knowledge about wells and pumps being totally exhausted, I called the company that installed the well. They did not promise they would be out the same day, but would make a call to their guys out in the field and let me know.

Oh "well"... pun intended

I don't feel human in the mornings until I have had a nice long hot shower. Hot showers wake me up better than cold showers. So, I went to our daughter's house down the road and took a nice long hot shower and came home feeling like a human.

The well company came out late morning or early afternoon. They duplicated my experiment with new fuses and checked the other electrical box (someday I need to figure out what those two boxes are actually for).

They then pulled their truck around to the well, opened it up, and began pulling the pipe out of the well. It was around fifteen 21-foot pieces attached to each other - over three-hundred feet of metal pipe in a six-hundred foot well.

They finally came to the pump and told me, based on some number on it, that it was 30 years old.

It turned out that the well pump was blown out by the lightning and the wiring was charred.
A replacement pump, plus labor could be had for the mere cost of a low-end used car. Time to call the insurance company. We have a $1000 deductible and the insurance would kick in for the rest of the cost of the pump. While they were at it, I had them replace the rusted pipes with PVC for only a few hundred more.

They installed the new pump, wiring, and pipes, then "shocked" the well with a huge dose of chlorine in some form.

As of late afternoon Thursday, the water was still horribly dirty. We were not supposed to drink it for a couple of days because of all the chlorine they added to the well to "shock" it. The water was so dirty we had to bypass the water filters for the house so as not to clog them up.

We finally were able to turn the switch to let the water go through the filters on the weekend. It stained the basins and tubs and showers. We did not use the dishwasher or washing machine until we hooked back up the filters. We showered at our daughter's house until we turned the filters back on. We turned off the ice-maker and water in the refrigerator. We drank bottled water and soda, and used bottled water for brushing our teeth.

Fourth of July

For the fourth this year, we had a delicious meal - corn on the cob, potato salad, pinto beans, bread, grilled tofu for the vegetarians, and pot roast (a la Alton Brown) for the carnivores. Colleen baked a red, white, and blue pie (strawberries for the red, blackberries for the blue, and pie crust on the top for the white, with some pie-crust stars).

That evening, we all took a drive to the Carroll County Fairgrounds to watch the Berryville fireworks show. The fireworks were set off on the top of a hill that is high enough for people to see from several different places. Some people even had chairs set up in their yards so they could see the fireworks. There was a huge turnout at the fairgrounds. Earlier, an Elvis impersonator was singing songs. During the fireworks, several songs were played - patriotic and country.

For a small town, Berryville put on a great show - rivaled some we had seen in the big city of Atlanta.

Afterwards, we came back and the kids roasted marshmallows in our new firepit on our new flagstone patio.

Our Second Swarm

We had another swarm this past week. However, it was not as exciting as the first. This swarm split off one of our own hives, and there were less than one-fourth the number of bees that were in the earlier swarm.

I was sitting in my office, glanced out the window, and saw a small tornado of bees gathering in an oak tree in the front yard.

Unfortunately, we had no more spare beehive parts. We had to borrow a super from our daughter and son-in-law. I emailed a couple of the members of our beekeeping club, and one of them had a top and bottom board I could borrow for the super.

This one was more complicated, as the bees had swarmed around a limb too high for us to reach, even with our ladder. This necessitated me climbing the ladder, climbing up on a lower limb, and using the electric alligator loppers to detach two limbs from the tree - the first limb I cut down was between the limb the trees were on and the ground.

Trying to saw off the limb the bees were on, I managed to get the alligator loppers stuck. After much twisting, pushing, pulling, and shoving, I finally freed the loppers. However, the limb was not completely severed.

Back down on the ground, we tried using a rope to pull the limb from the trunk of the tree - to no avail. We then tried twisting the branch for a while - again, no luck. Finally, I climbed back up the ladder with the loppers, and cut further from the trunk and the limb finally fell on top of the super.

We gently grabbed handfuls of bees off the limb and dropped them into the super. We finally got the queen into the super and the rest of the bees followed her in.

Early that same evening, we rearranged the two existing hives so we had a hive body on which to place the super. We then placed the top and bottom boards on the super, and carried it to our "apiary".

Knowing that the bees needed some quick energy so they could begin drawing out comb on the frames inside the hive body and super, we made some sugar water, placed it in the quart jar and placed it in the feeder.

That turned out to be a mistake.

Over the next few days, the bees from the "new" hive and the old hive next to it became very agitated. It finally became apparent that the old bees were flying from their hive to the new hive and robbing the feeder of sugar water. We did not see the bees actually fighting the first couple of days, but we stopped filling the feeder with the sugar water. Yesterday, I took a look, and saw two bees from the new hive dragging one of the old bees down the side of the hive, making all kinds of racket as they duked it out.

When we get the new pieces we ordered, we will take a closer look and see what is left. Buzzing can be heard from all three hives, so it may turn out okay in spite of our mistake.

Chiggers, Ticks, and Frozen Shoes

In the Ozarks, Spring is a wonderful time. Leaves on trees turn again to green. Myriad flowers bloom in glorious colors. Blooms on vines and bushes give way to fruit - wild blackberries, wild strawberries, wild blueberries, grapes. Grasses begin to grow.


As early Spring turns to late Spring and then to early summer, all kinds of critters come out to play.


Among those are chiggers and ticks. Chiggers and ticks. Ticks and chiggers.


Chiggers - microscopic bugs, too small for the human eye to see unaided. You are out in the woods enjoying nature, hiking in the woods, enraptured by the sights, the colors, the fresh smells of flowers in bloom.


You return home from your nature hike, having enjoyed it so very much.


The next day, you experience a horrible itching on your ankles, your legs, behind your knees, and around your waist. Red welts rise in those places. Time to get out the summer medicines.


Chiggers, nasty creatures that they are, don't really bite. After you picked up the unseen hitchhikers, they crawl around your body, looking for a place to settle down for a feast. They begin to feed if they reach a barrier, such as the top of your socks, the waistband of your clothes or your armpit.


They attach themselves to your skin, inject saliva with digestive enzymes that helps to break down your skin cells, which the chigger drinks. These enzymes cause the itchy rash.


That is why it is good to use a repellent, like DEET, although that does not work 100%. That is why is is good to shower or bathe, thoroughly, scrubbing twice, after you have been out in nature.



Ticks - not so microscopic arachnid, yes, related to the spider. Unlike chiggers, which run to you, ticks wait for you to come to them, often at the top of tall grass or weeds. You can actually see them if you look closely when walking in the woods, as they wave their arms, as if to say, "Come to me!"


Around here, we have the lone-star tick, a hard tick. The females are distinguishable by the white dot or "star" on its back. The males can also have dots or white streaks on the edge of their bodies.


Either before or after bathing to rid yourself of chiggers after a day in nature, you need to check for ticks - everywhere, even the nooks and crannies on your body. The only way to remove them is with tweezers. Any other method can leave their mouth still on your body and can lead to infection. In addition, ticks, from the beginning of their life cycle to the end, feed on various creatures and humans. They can carry diseases from the animals to you, injecting them into your bloodstream.


What do you do with the ticks after removing them? We keep a "tick jar" in the kitchen. It is filled with rubbing alcohol, and we simply drop them in the jar where they die a horrible death after a brief struggle!

In addtion, when we come in from outdoors, we place our shoes in plastic kitchen trash bags and stick them in the freezer overnight. This kill the chiggers that may still be on the shoes.


It is so easy to bring the ticks and chiggers into the house with you. Which is why we have another plastic kitchen trash bag to drop out clothing into. Later the clothing will be washed in very hot water.


Still, by the time late fall and early winter roll around, the rashes and bites have healed, the annoying itching is gone, and all we remember, until next summer, are the joys of experiencing the beauty of nature.

Tornadoes

I just realized I mentioned an April tornado in the last post, but have never posted the story.

The story begins Wednesday, April 9, 2008.

It started out with almost continuous lightning and raucous thunder. The sky was lit up with the lightning almost as bright as sunlight. The thunder, lightning, and rain continued almost non-stop. At some point during the night, I was awakened by a bright flash of lightning, a loud thunderclap, and what souned like a tree being hit by lightning. I did not have my rain guage out, so I had no idea how much rain we got overnight. It sure sounded like plenty. We lost power sometime during the night.

The power came on again around 2am Thursday. It was still on when we woke up at 6am.

Around 6:30am, Colleen was sitting in the living room putting her shoes on. Suddenly things got very, very dark, windy, and torrential rains come down. The power went out immediately. I was sure it was a tornado (we were under a tornado watch). The wind was beating relentlessly against the windows. It frightened us so much, we ran to the bathroom and hid there until it passed.

When we finally came out of the bathroom, we saw part of a pine tree lying next to the dining room window. It was continuing to rain, though nowhere as heavily as it had just been. We took a short walk outside to see what had happened. We saw that the pine tree had fallen in such a way that the outer top branches just brushed the dining room roof.

When the rain stopped and the sun came out, we started walking around our property to check out what happened. We saw six or seven more pine trees which had fallen behind our garden shed. Most of them fell against another large oak tree. One tree fell into a cedar tree just behind the garden shed and thus the shed was spared any damage. The front yard was littered with pine branches.

We then walked down the driveway that goes out the northernmost part of our property. We saw even more pine trees, and some oaks, that had fallen over from the roots, had snapped down near the bottom, or had been twisted off the trunk a few feet from the ground. During that walk we saw the remains of a pine tree which had been struck by lightning, charred from the top to the bottom, with a barber-pole like stripe down the tree where bark had come off when the lightning struck.

All in all, we counted two-dozen (at least) trees that had gone down during the storm. They were in such a straight-line pattern, it sure seemed like it was from a tornado.

Then we walked down to the "gentle" creek that flows across the road a little further north of our property. This creek, usually a few feet wide and either very dry or with a gentle flow, was now at least ten feet across with the water rushing in a mad torrent. That made me think we must have received several inches of water since the storm had started just a few hours earlier.

We also saw another pine tree which had fallen from our property across the dirt road at the east of our property effectively blocking any exit to civilization. There is another creek to the southeast of us that we found out was so bad that even the trucks from the electric company would not cross. Trees were down all up and down the road. In one spot the road was covered with water where there is not even a creek.

Later that afternoon, I discovered the pine tree that fell outside our dining room was not one but TWO pine trees.

Oh, yes, the electric company. The storm had snapped four power poles in half and it took them most of the day to replace them and get power back. The power came back at 8pm. It was the next day before we had telephone service.

This was more excitement than we could stand and we were exhausted.

How much wood?

For the past two days, we've had a new visitor in our yard. This little guy is know variously as Woodchuck, Groundhog, Marmot, and Whistling Pig. This one is probably at the upper limit in total length - around two feet. The first day, we spied him crawling under the car. Today, he was outside the dining room, under and around the pine tree downed by the April tornado.


With all the trees downed, both by the April tornado and those we had cut down both before and after the tornado, it would be nice if they really chucked wood. Unfortunately, it appears this creature mainly eats grass and clover. But we have plenty of clover (the second picture was captured while he was eating the clover outside the dining room window).

The name woodchuck has nothing to do with wood or chucking. It comes from the Algonquian name for the animal, "wuchak".

The woodchuck is a burrowing animal. Given the concrete hardness of the ground here and how rocky it is, I wonder how this one dug any burrows.

From what I've read, they can move around 35 cubic feet of dirt when digging a burrow. With two to five entrances, the woodchuck's burrow can have 45 feet of tunnels.


One of the reasons it is called a whistling pig is that, when alarmed, a woodchuck will use a high-pitched whistle to alert the colony.

A Silver Spoon

We just finished doing something that, a year ago, we never thought we would do.


When Colleen decided last spring that she wanted to buy some bees and equipment and start beekeeping, I thought it was an interesting idea, but not for me. She did all the work on the hives last year until it came time to extract the honey. Then I helped. The results were delicious - all fourteen pounds of it.


So this year, I decided to join in the fun and, aided by Colleen, I installed the second hive. I found it to be an eye-opening hobby.


It is amazing how docile they can be. You open up the hive to check them out (after smoking them with a smoker). You can then pick up the frames and turn them around and upside down and the bees keep working away as if nothing is happening. Of course, the bee suit and veil give you more confidence when working around bees.


It is also interesting to watch them during the day when they are so busy. It is like a madhouse. Bees are coming in from their foraging, and waiting in line to get inside to make their deposits, while others are going around in circles, ever higher, then flying off over the tops of trees to go out and gather more nectar, pollen, and water.


We were out most of the day today, and got back home early afternoon. After getting out of the car, we heard a loud buzzing sound. We tracked it down to a huge pine tree at the edge of the wooded area of our property out front. There was a huge swarm of bees just settling down on a branch.







At first, we were afraid that our bees had swarmed. We were trying to figure out how to get them off the branch, twenty-five feet up, and into an extra hive body we had. A swarm is what happens when a group of bees is led by a queen from their hive to start their own hive.


The book "First Lessons in Beekeeping" describes it thusly "Groups of workers begin a frenzied wave of running action around and around the interior of the nest. The old queen mother is bitten, jostled, and otherwise worried into a state of excitement. Then at once, about half the colony's population, along with the queen mother, takes wing and pours out of the colony's entrance, forming a cloud of bees easily filling a space equal to a suburban back yard."


They leave behind a new queen and the other part of the hive. So you can imagine why we were worried, we thought we had lost some bees.


We had read some information about capturing a swarm, as well as heard swarm-capturing stories in the beekeepers club we belong to. Our favorite story was from a man who used the shot-gun method once. He put a box under the branch, and used his shotgun to shoot down the branch so it fell in the box.


Our ladder was not long enough to get near the branch. So we called our daughter and son-in-law who live about 1/3 mile down the dirt road from us. We told them they could have the bees if they could help get them out of the tree. Our son-in-law always seems to have a tool for a job.







The first ladder he had was not long enough. So they went back to find another one.



While all of this was going on, I checked out our hives to see whether the swarm might be from our hives. It turns out our hives were well-populated and it did not seem they were ours. Later we compared pictures and the swarm bees looked like a different type than ours.


When they came back, our daughter and son-in-law brought a longer ladder, a hacksaw, and a pool net. Colleen set up the hive body directly under the swarm. I switched out one of the empty frames for a frame with uncapped honey from one of our hives. This was to give the swarm something that would be attractive them once we got them out of the tree.


Our son-in-law first tried the cardboard box method. He climbed up the ladder, held the cardboard box under the swarm and jostled them to try to get them into the box. Every step he took up the ladder shook the tree and the branch and the bees kept shifting around in the swarm making it look like a shape-shifting creature as the swarm took on different configurations.







The cardboard box method did not work well. A few hundred bees fell into the box and I dumped them into the hive body. But to get the bees to stay you have to get the queen into it.


He climbed back up the ladder with the hacksaw, and proceeded to saw off the limb. The limb fell on top of the hive body and some of the bees fell into the body as well. However, the queen bee flew back up to another limb in the tree, followed by a spiraling group of bees. It seemed
as if the air was full of bees.







Then he took the pool net, put it under the swarm, shook it, and dumped the bees from the net into the hive body. We all took turns doing that and we eventually got the queen into the hive body. The rest of the bees followed her. It was interesting seeing so many bees (might have been several thousand bees) doing that. Colleen and her daughter were scooping up handfuls of bees and dropping them into the hive body (of course we were all in bee suits with veils and gloves).









The bees quickly calmed down and began their job of settling into their new hive.







A swarm of bees in May

Is worth a load of hay;

A swarm of bees in June

Is worth a silver spoon;

A swarm of bees in July

Is not worth a fly.


Old beekeeper's saying.