I guess the small motel business is in the same boat. Tonight over a dinner of steak, baked potato, green beans, and a small salad, Mrs. Evans, the owner of the Nueces river motel told me that her and her late husband were only planning on keeping the motel 1 year when they bought it years 40 some years ago. She is as proud as punch that all of the refrigerators are still original. I can say that I certainly would not like to have a child end up in the westing house that I am currently staring at.

The compressor just broke the silence.

The motel is only part of the promise I made made myself to get back to basics. With the beginning of Grampas Gourmet I not only wanted to run bees like gramps but I wanted walk in his footsteps and sleep where he slept. The first job was to find homes for the bees. In Grampa’s day this task was simple as most ranchers back then understood the importance of pollinators and LOVED getting free honey for the use of what amounted to .0001% of their land. Since wealth here seems to be measured in acres this was a no brainer. In fact if you multiply it out and they would be making what today would be $12,000 per acre on the one hundredth of an acre that the bees occupy. Not to mention surplus mesquite beans, parsimons, and other natural feed for live stock.

Today, however, this is not the case. As mentioned in part one, the highest prices for land use goes first to the highest bidder if the family is willing to sell. The ranches are large from 500 to 1/4 million acres. So as you can imagine they aren’t cheap. The only people who can afford to purchase them are multi-millionaires, corporations, and developers. When the developers get them the land is gone. It is broken up into lots and sold to people who build vacation homes. When any of the other two entities get them the are converted to game ranches. The vacationers don’t  have room for bees as they typically fill their 1to5 acres up with stuff to keep them working while they are on vacation, and the hunters on the game ranches just don’t seem to like those pesky bees around while they are sitting in their hunting blinds trying to kill that big buck whitetail deer. Or even worse have a beekeeper drive in to check the bees and scare away the said deer.  (side note: today was the first day of deer season and the reason I have time to write this as I have to wait to move the bees next week when the city deer hunters go home).

Out of all of the ranches in the area that my grandfather kept bees I would say that 80% have either changed hands or have gone strictly to hunting leases to pay the bills.

As I started to look for bee locations I contacted the children and grandchildren of the previous owners whom my grandfather knew. They helped the best they could and I found 2 that still had their ranches and were ranching. They agreed to let me put the bees out and were ecstatic to get honey. My other locations came by way chance and begging

I believe that the hunting ranches still have promise for the bees. Bees pollenate many of the brush species of plants that deer and other game species feed on.  This obviously helpseoduce fruit and seeds and helps the plants reproduce and thrive, hence larger healthier deer ect. If I can educate the managers of these ranches about this perhaps they will be more agreeable. Time will tell. As for now this country needs rain more than anything.

Here I sit alone, in a small old motel room in Barksdale Texas, Saturday night. Three doors away from room #6, (I am in #3, there are only 6 rooms) the room that the beekeepers would gather in. They would drink whiskey while they talked bees and told stories of the ranchers they had seen while doing work in the outlying beeyards and the gossip or rather the news of the country. Mostly the news was of who had died, been hurt or who was in trouble. It was the way news was spread then and believe it or not, down here it still is.

It is dead quite except for the occasional truck rolling by.

Back then there were at least 5 different beekeeping operators that migrated from Colorado to Texas. All of them were based in Colorado but met up here twice a year. Once in the fall when old man winter started nipping and the bees stopped flying in the San Luis valley (elevation 7400) when every one would gather their bees and truck them 850 miles south to the hill country of Texas. Effectively giving the bees an extended fall, and much milder winter as well as an earlier spring. Why here? Well it was the best place, the farthest south that one could drive without stopping (more or less) in one VERY FULL day. The beekeepers and their hired hands would eventually meet up in town and pick a night hang out, usually on a Saturday such as this.

Another truck just rolled by.

Today there are just two of us Bill Rickey and me. Bill is 60 and a son of one of the original 5. He has ecked out a meager living for the past 30 some years and managed to survive while everyone else is gone. It’s not surprising that our “industry” is all but gone. The Texas hill country was the start and heart of Texas ranching and it is all but gone as well. Here the rule seems to be that land has to pay the bills. Whether its live stock, farming, hunting, or selling. It is clear that the latter two have proven the most lucrative.

A dog just barked.

Out of the depression America was a producing nation and as such commodities were king. The hill country supplied the wool from both sheep and goats that keep our soldiers warm in World War II and my grandfather produced the bees wax that kept the wool and the artillery dry. Today there are synthetics instead of wool and there are petroleum based waxes.

I grew up in the bees, my grandfather passed when I was young, I learned from my uncle who, when he took over the family business quit coming to this part of Texas to winter. I grew up on stories about Barksdale, Camp Wood, and La Pryor Texas. The stories stuck with me and I lavished them. Many of the stories are based around local characters who are ranchers or vise versa.

When I finally went out on my own I was more concentrated on the bees and my own ego. I thought I knew how to improve on my own family tradition. So I put my memories away and opted to winter my bees closer in southern New Mexico. The first few years I was lucky to have favorable weather and healthy bees. But in 2006 I lost half of my 600 colonies during the winter. I didn’t know what had happened but I found out later that it wasn’t just me. It was nation wide. Since that year beekeepers around the country having been having severe ongoing issues. In 2009, after 3 years of trying everything I knew to keep the bees healthy it occured to me that perhaps we as bee keepers have simply forgot the basics, just as most Americans have forgot about wool and beeswax, and have been slowly changing our ways to the point that the bees are out of sync.

As a result of this epiphany I developed a new-old way of beekeeping and in the process started a new company with new-old goals and very old ideas.

Part two. In Grampas footsteps…