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…

Tagged as:  beekeeping, dispatch from the field   ·   Categories:  Blog