A chain reaction of the kindred curious saves the day
Here comes a real shocker: Writing this column is not my full-time job. I know, I know, my mastery of sixth-grade level compositional technique had you fooled. Unfortunately, the Pulitzer committee has yet to come knocking, and until such time as it does, I will continue to rely on a day job to pay the bills. That reality lands me, day to day, in the office of the local Soil and Water Conservation District.
Thankfully, every incoming phone call or walk-in visitor has the potential to spring me out into the field, where adventure invariably awaits. Those adventures are often echoed on these pages. In this manner my full-time job complements my part-time job and sometimes vice versa. My previous part-time job — cleaning toilets at a lumber mill on the weekends — didn’t have nearly the crossover appeal.
Sometimes readers track me down at my day job if they happen across something interesting. Take for instance the recent happenstance of a rural resident calling to alert me to her sighting of “a very strange beehive” along a township road near the bottom of the county. The caller, Kathy, snapped a grainy flip-phone image of a swarming hive and gave me explicit, turn-by-turn directions to the site. (“Then, once you pass the washed-out driveway culvert, look to the right at about eyeball level just behind the grapevine.”)
While bees are not my particular forte, as pollinators they fall under the broad umbrella of “conservation concerns,” and this situation looked, for lack of a better term, concerning.
A jittery mass of thousands of bees, they looked like they’d set up housekeeping on a seething sack of potatoes. How Kathy had spotted this spectacle in the first place remains a mystery. The fact that she had, however, clearly revealed her as a kindred spirit. I’ve spent a lifetime spotting weird things in the woods and chasing them down for answers. I let her know I was on the case and that I’d keep her posted.
I like bees. They do a fine job pollinating things and create a delicious topping for my morning oatmeal along the way, but I’m not apt to cozy up to a giant ball of them, no matter what the circumstance. This was a job for an expert, and I just so happened to know one within a country block of the very spot of our siting. I sent him a text message with the photo, and his instantaneous response was, “I’ll check it out.” I went about my work hoping for an update later that afternoon.
A dairy farmer interested in literally everything, when Jim happens upon “something weird,” he leaps in head first, takes it apart, figures it out and then forms an LLC based upon the experience. I witnessed this behavior close up when he first got into bees just a few years ago. Within no time he was planting fields specifically to benefit his bees. As kindred spirits go, Jim is what I want to be when I grow up.
No more than a half-hour passed before my phone dinged with a photo of three generations of beekeepers, each decked out in a white sting-proof suit, lowering the entire buzzing mass into a happy new hive box home. “We got ‘em,” read the accompanying text.
Turns out what I’d described as a “sack of potatoes” was actually the honeycomb itself, fully exposed to the weather and set for destruction at the first deep dip in temperature. A chain reaction of the kindred curious had saved the day!
Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.