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Crossing the Red Sea

•Our best crop

•My brother Tom

•Coming out of the fire

•More than a truce

•the bears and the bees

•Billy Engelhardt

•Wherever we go

the bears and the bees

July 29, 2003

He nourished him the honey from the rock ........

Deuteronomy 32:13

In the days when the Bible was written, bees made their homes in rocky places, and on hot days when the rocks got hot, honey would ooze out.

Out of the hard places in life, God gives us sweetness.

Much of our work these days is cleaning up after brown bears devour our bees.

They scatter the homes of the bees, and after we find all of this, we walk around the bee yards and into the fields and woods beyond picking up the pieces. It takes hours, and at first, I felt so violated. The weeks that we pour into building and restoring equipment each year have felt so frustrating as the bears keep tearing apart the homes of our bees.

We try to save the bees, hoping that the queen and as much of the family as possible are in the boxes.

The other day, a bear(s) knocked over 13 colonies in the Plessis yard. This was a record. Usually they destroy one to three at a time.

If we come days later, many of the bees are still clinging onto their broken homes, faithfully clustered as a family, now exposed to the rain and sun.

We keep adding wires to the electric fences in attempt to keep the bears from slipping through. The standard fence now has seven wires, and it is our hope that these will keep the bears away. I am amazed at how many stings and electric shock a bear will take for this meal. Buying and installing all of this equipment is expensive – last week the income from selling honey was only slightly more the amount we had spent on trying to deal with the bears alone.

We are approaching 60 colonies of bees lost to the bears this season. The day was spent putting frames and boxes on the truck that had been dismantled by the bears in the last few months. When we went to the Herb bee yard, we found that two more colonies had been taken by the bears in the last three days. Here we learned that the batteries that we use must be recharged after five days or they lose enough of their "sting" that bears walk right in. A few weeks earlier we did not understand how the bear was getting into the fenced in bee yard until we saw that the bear was climbing an ash tree next to the fence and then jumping over the hot wires to get into the bee yard.

I was weary and sad. All of the trials with the bears had worn me down, but this was naturally being merged into other information that I was continually gathering. I have increasingly seen that I have spread myself too thin and was trying to do much in order to make our beekeeping-agricultural business work, especially in a year of a light honey crop. The bears were giving me a message.- let go of trying to work in so many wide-spread geographical areas and take care of bees closer to home.

A peace has settled over me. I see the bears now as our allies. They had helped me to see something that was much more important than all of the equipment and honey we had "lost" to them this season and last.

I was so thankful.