Let's start with the good news

-Posted by Isaac

Well, the good news is, it looks like we’ve got a few days in a row without rain.

No, wait…

One last kick in the ribs on Monday. Even on a day that promised only a 30% chance of showers, we somehow managed 1.25 inches in a single intense hour. I’m so calloused to it by now. I walked out of the honey house and thought, Is that all you got?

It was just enough to make my little duck happy.

By Wednesday we were drying out. The other ducks began to wonder about climate change… Where did all our water go?

And I could finally take a risk on doing some laundry.

If only someone would invent a machine that would sort of tumble and heat clothes at the same time. Some sort of drying machine. I could do a load more often, like once a month. Instead of once every three. Jayne would love me! …If only…

It’s beginning to feel like summer.

Here’s the good news. Remember that rescue box I put out? It functioned as a catcher of homeless bees after the raging waters took an entire yard. I’m happy to say it worked. It’s now safe on high ground at my parents’ place. Eden points it out—

It was so packed full of bees, I put another brood box on top after adding a queen. Checking back today, I found an entire frame of eggs. It’ll be a strong hive in a couple months. Yay! Salvaged one.

Thanks by the way, for all the comments and sympathies. Jayne put news of that little flood disaster on social media and it got more shares and comments than I’ve ever seen. And I have to say, it’s nice to feel loved. Even though I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of guilt, considering the real suffering the farmers are going through. Yes, it was a shocker, and yes we felt pretty sad about it. But no, we’re not about to go out of business, as some of your comments insinuated. ;)

Nevertheless… taking advantage of our sudden internet celebrity—

Did you see the GoFundMe I started? For our recovery efforts, I mean? It’s the Honeyrun Farm Go Fund Bee: I estimate that bee yard’s value (including reparations for emotional distress) to be approximately $1,000,000

To date, we’ve raised approximately $0.

But I know your heart is in the right place. I know you want to save the bees. You’ll reconsider… do you really need to make that rent payment? Do you really need diapers for the baby this month? Please, please consider the bees. Your friends, my friends, the bees.

Ok, in other good news:

We’re still running spring honey! It’s been slightly better than I anticipated. The buckets are piling up.

We won’t be going out of business this year, if Maizy has anything to say about it.

Just look at the beautiful white flow! Delicious!

I think it’s even prettier and more translucent than last year’s spring. But maybe I’m just biased. Come check it out this Saturday. We’ll have it up at Worthington.

In other good news:

Lots of wax!

We’ll have those candles brightened up soon with some brand new cappings wax.

And in other good news:

The tulip poplar has panned out again! That’s three years in a row!

As some of you know, we keep 30-40 hives in a couple locations near the Hocking Hills. The purpose being, to produce this dark, rich and lovely varietal honey. You can’t make it here in the flatlands, it requires about an hour drive to the dark hill country.

I was happy to come home with some weight on the truck.

So there it is. The good news.

But if you’re still dwelling on the bad news, if your heart is hurting and your wallet is burning… no problem. There’s still time to donate. Honeyrun Farm Go Fund Bee.

Just contact my lawyer at: 1-800-SAUL-GOODMAN.

It’s all good, man!

On second thought, maybe 'terrible' is the word for it.

-Posted by Isaac

I have to apologize, I had such a good one planned for you— the meaning of life, the meaning of death, that sort of thing. It all began to coagulate two weeks ago on the way down to Nelsonville.

Maizy and I had such an interesting conversation. I was in a meditative state, listening to Sam Harris talk about the nature of consciousness. She barged in with her questions and boy, did we get into it. What a wave of insight. What a flood of thought.

Then, those thoughts combined with the sounds, sights and substances of the festival itself, I anticipated sharing a pretty involved blog post. I’ve been chewing on it for two weeks.

But it was all for naught. Nature had other plans this week.

No flood of deep thinking for you today.

Just a flood.

The nature of Nature.

No, that’s not the Ohio River pictured above. That’s our backyard.

Or more specifically, our buckwheat field.

You can see the high water mark on the big walnut tree. And the home hives in the distance. Yes, the water actually lapped up to the base of the hives. Higher than we’ve ever seen it since moving here in 2006.

Beehives float.

But bees drown.

We had our first flood casualties five miles down the road. A healthy, productive bee yard the day before. Now nothing. Just some bricks and concrete blocks.

16 hives down the river.

I put out a single sad box to catch the homeless. In less than a minute it was filling up.

I’ll give them a queen this afternoon. We’ll see what happens.

Even though the landowner called to tell me, it was still a shock to see that blank hole.

It happened in the night. My friend Rachel, who lives near that yard, posted her rain gauge on Facebook. Five inches!

She said she hadn’t forgotten to dump it from the previous rain. Five inches in 36 hours.

I think we’ve had four consecutive nights of rain.

The title of this post was Jayne’s idea. A play off last week’s post. Although it remains terrible for the crop farmers, it’s getting more terrible every night for the bee farmers.

(Personally, I thought a good fitting title would be: THE NIGHT IS DARK AND FULL OF TERRORS)

I listen to the pounding roof all night, wake up, look out at the river running through the yard and think, Oh man, what’ll I find today?

Somehow those hives on the levee stayed put. The landowner called to tell me the water had made it up to the bottom box before receding.

So far, no more washed out bee yards, but they’re calling for another two inches before tomorrow. Yesterday I plugged in a favorite Led Zeppelin and just drove around. The song seemed to fit the mood.

Houses under water…

Crops and forests and fields…

Pastures and fences and equipment…

The above picture is my brother’s place. He had a bunch of drowned farm equipment somewhere in that mess. And I heard the other Justin, my brother-in-law, stayed up all last night pumping water off the produce farm. (Pictured in last week’s post.) (Did I say something about their weekly disasters?)

Even Westfall Schools took a beating.

But I guess that didn’t compromise the learning. School is still a long way off.

Sometimes I wish I was a kid again.

Maybe we’ll dry out by September.

That song just gave me another good title: CRYING WON’T HELP YOU, PRAYING WON’T DO YOU NO GOOD.

It hasn't been terrible

-Posted by Isaac

I’m trying to remain an optimist on this dreary evening as the rain comes down in torrents.

For us, I mean. It hasn’t been terrible for us. All in all, the bee farm has survived the spring. I can’t say as much for my poor sister, the produce farmer.

It seems every other week, she’s suffering a new disaster.

The climate change experts are telling us to get used to it. This is the new normal, they say. (I’d call them scientists, but you know we midwesterners don’t believe in that science stuff.)

I feel for all the farmers. Big and small alike. The muddy, sweat-drenched lettuce pickers and the climate controlled, mega-acreage commodity producers.

It’s been a tough spring for everybody. Way too much water. Almost daily I hear a news report about the plight of the midwestern farmer. There’s a lot of acreage not getting planted this year. The insurance companies will be busy.

I sometimes wonder about the economy of scale. Over the last couple decades the trend has been toward bigger farms and bigger equipment. Even if you only make a few pennies per bushel, when you manage to produce a few million bushels, you’re ok. Buy a new truck, another big tractor… pay high rent next year… But these super wet spring seasons seem to be throwing a wrench in that philosophy. If you can’t get in to plant your 10,000 acres, what good is it?

This is something I haven’t heard discussed in all the sob story news pieces. It seems to me that the smaller farmers were able to get in and get done just fine. They made good on the five or six dry planting days they had. Maybe someone should give a small farmer the microphone.

Just thinking out loud.

Flooding wasn’t the only problem this spring. When we were out bouncing around Utah, we heard about you getting nailed with tornadoes. I had a buddy from Toledo text me at 5am (Utah time) and ask if we made it. Are you ok?, he asked. Yeah man, we’re fine. Go back to sleep.

And we were fine. I called Mom and found out nothing horrible happened. She forgot to mention the big cottonwood in our backyard had snapped in two.

But this wasn’t terrible. It gave us a multi-day bonfire, plus a newly rebuilt clothesline. Something I know my lovely wife has always wanted. (If only it happened closer to her birthday.)

Since we’ve been home, I’ve discovered that the bees were busy in the comb yards. They really took advantage of the few sunny days.

We’ve now cut up several boxes of beautiful white spring comb. The best!

Even Mason gave it a go.

It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you put limits on device time.

He even gave us a hand in the bottling room.

And what about the bottling? Are we going to have any liquid spring honey this year?

Yes!

No bumper crop by any means, but there was enough heat and enough sunshine to make some magic.

Just enough during the spring bloom.

About a third of the hives are filled out with the delicate white honey. I learned my lesson (again) with the other two thirds— you’re splitting too hard! Something to keep in mind for next year.

We’re a week into the spring harvest, and it’s looking like it will take another two weeks to finish up. Maybe a little longer if this rain keeps coming. It’s not looking good.

But turning to the other farmers, many of them still trying to plant, I have no room to complain. I guess it hasn’t been terrible.

Prone to wander, Lord I feel it

-Posted by Isaac

I love it when a plan comes together.

Remember that weekly Hannibal quote from the A-Team? (Those of you over 40.)

I really do love it. Especially when I do zero of the planning. I’m so thankful that Jayne not only loves to travel, she can also orchestrate a trip like the one we just took. We’ve been doing this for, I think, four years now. Traveling around Memorial Day. At first I thought it was a little nutty… do you realize what we do, Honey?? We’re beekeepers! It’s the height of the season! But I’m used to it by now and I’ve adjusted the schedule accordingly. Anyway, I’m usually so overwhelmed and burnt out on bees by late May, these little getaways are probably healthy for all of us. I don’t do any thinking or logistics. She handles it all.

Let me tell you about this one— Seven days, four kids, seven national parks! If you permit me, I’ll share a picture or two from each park and maybe a memory to go with it.

In chronological order:

Arches

-Crowded! (As you can see.) But still beautiful.

-In the visitor center, we ran into an old geology professor from Wittenberg. Small world! He was surrounded by summer field studies students from Santa Barbra, CA. Talking strata, of course.

-One of the view points on the map was called The Garden of Eden. Our Eden made sure we got to that one.

Canyonlands

-Spectacular views! Windy!

-This park made me remember Edward Abby and the characters in The Monkey Wrench Gang. I did a lot of preaching… which nobody listened to.

Capitol Reef

-Another awesome geology talk in the visitor center. This one given by a cute young park ranger, and lasted a full half hour because some annoying guy from Ohio kept asking questions.

-The morning we left Capitol Reef, we were greeted with the biggest, most beautiful snowflakes ever—

Up around 9000 feet, those big flakes stopped being beautiful. 15 mph, 10% grade. This was how we spent Memorial Day.

No need for sunglasses.

Bryce Canyon

-We had a nice long hike in Bryce. It was still cold, but the kids managed without too much whining.

Zion

Eden! Get away from that hippie people-hugger tree!

-Of the seven we visited, this was my personal favorite with its massive red sandstone cliffs.

-It was crowded in the afternoon, but the next morning about daylight, I took a run up some trails. Had the place to myself.

Mesa Verde

-Another long hike. Probably three hours. We had to get to those petroglyphs! Our kids were troopers

-Leaving Mesa Verde and traveling across beautiful southern Colorado, we had the chance to officially make this a business trip.

Great Sand Dunes

-For the kids, this park was the highlight of the trip. They had been here two years ago and I guess the memories were good.

-It’s just a big sandbox, but if you feel inclined, it makes for a pretty intense workout.

Ironically that day, the last of the trip, I had Dylan’s You Ain’t Going Nowhere rolling through my head. I think it came to me because of one line in particular: We’ll climb that hill no matter how steep…

When we come up to it.

Don't blink

-Posted by Isaac

There they go.

Last day of school. Do you think they learned anything?

Thankfully, we already have one proud graduate in the family.

What a blur, this time of year. A time of energy and transition. The kids are moving into summer-play mode and the bees are going out to hopefully produce some honey. Summer-work mode.

After watching Eden strut up to receive her preschool degree, I loaded the last 16 apple pollinators for their move to better pastures. The rain has made this somewhat slow and difficult this year.

This group will come of age in western Madison County. Notice the honeysuckle is still in bloom out that direction.

Although it’s a busy stressful blur, I can’t help but love this transitional time of spring. We’re watching our babies grow up.

It all starts as a fantastic idea, doesn’t it? I think I want to create something. I want to bring something into this world and make it better. The potential is endless.

For a couple months, every morning I would rob the queen bank.

The last few…

Between the nuc sales and splits for our own purposes, we went through some 800 queens in April and May. Wow, that’s a lot of potential!

And before you know it, you have babies everywhere.

Very fast growing babies!

But I look at our own kids, I look at the 4-H goat we got in March, the baby ducks and chicks we got in April, even the baby rabbit we got last week… and I think, they all grow fast! All babies!

And they’ll grow up right too, provided you shed some love and attention.

All too soon, you’ve got teenagers.

Rambunctious, undisciplined and headstrong teenagers who need space.

If you don’t give them what they want, they’ll become insubordinate.

A bit of gentle coaxing may be in order…

But that period passes quickly. Blink and you’ll miss it.

Turn around again and you’ve got yourself full-grown, productive adults.

No, they’re not as cute, but it’s still a joy to see them reach their potential.

I remember riding in the truck with my dad. I was about 11 years old, Dad would have been mid-forties, and he was talking about my grandfather Barnes. He said something like, “Isaac, you won’t believe it, someday you’ll be 75 years old, you’ll turn around and think, where did it all go?”

Dad will be 77 in a few days. I wonder if he remembers telling me that?

But I took it to heart. I’m only in my mid-forties and I believe him!