A Country Year

by Hubbell, Liddy; Hubbell, Sue;

  One night when I turned on a light in my cabin I found a mother wolf spider with a back covered with babies. Most spiders don’t have much interest in their young, but wolf spiders carry them around wherever they go. When the spiderlings emerge from their egg sac, they crawl up on their mother’s back and cling to her. The ones I watched, tiny, delicate, perfect miniatures, were an unruly lot and appeared to be causing her no end of trouble. They crawled over her eyes and she had to brush them away. They jostled one another, and several tumbled off onto the floor and then scurried to climb up her legs and return to the security of her back.

  The wolf spider and the house spider are both big as spiders go; an outside skeleton imposes mechanical limits on the size of a body that can function nicely. But other, even larger spiders are common in my garden: the black and yellow argiopes, which spin distinctive webs that look as if they had zippers in them. They are brilliant, glossy, stylish spiders, and out there in the garden they trap grasshoppers that eat my tomatoes. They spin winding sheets around the insects and store them until they are needed, like thrifty housewives stocking the larder. It is a way of making a living of which I thoroughly approve, the sort of thing that makes us label the spider as beneficial while condemning the grasshopper as harmful.

  I’ll admit that I wasn’t nearly so pleased one day when I discovered a black and yellow argiope who had spun her web in front of one of my beehives and had stocked her particular larder with tidily wrapped honeybees who had flown directly into it on their way home, heavily laden with their loads of nectar. I destroyed her web and moved her over to a bush where I hoped she would find something to eat that pleased her equally and me rather more.

  Web-weaving spiders don’t see very well by our standards; they are so nearsighted that when the males come courting they pluck the strands of the female’s web to announce their arrival in order not to be taken for tasty morsels. So I doubt that the beehive argiope was able to see me when I moved her. In a way this was a pity, because for all our differences we share something important. We are both beekeepers; both of us make a living from the bees. My way, compared to hers, seems excessively Byzantine. I cosset the bees all year long, take away their extra honey, process it, bottle it, truck it to New York to sell to Bloomingdale’s, and then use the check to buy the things I need. She simply eats bees.

  We are both animate bundles of the chemicals common to all living things: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. Both of us have been presented with a set of problems posed by our chemistry and quickness, among them how to grow and how to make a living. Those are big questions, and as is often the case with Big Questions, we have come up with different answers—answers that in turn are still different from those of the honeybee, who is a similar chemical bundle and upon whom we both depend for a living. The honeybee’s solutions have more to do with metamorphosis and the nectar of flowers, and those answers are good ones, too.

  Living in a world where the answers to questions can be so many and so good is what gets me out of bed and into my boots every morning.

  Last Sunday we held the South Central Missouri Beekeepers Annual Pig Roast. We have it on my place each year in July, because I have space enough in back under the big oak trees for the seventy people who usually come, and also because I am the only one in the group who lives on a river, and they like to have a place to swim. I ask the commander of the VFW post ahead of time, and he always gives permission for the beekeepers and their families to use the beach down there on that Sunday.

  One of our members is both a pig farmer and a beekeeper, and it is he who donates the pig. He comes in the morning to get the fire started. He arranges a circle of stones and concrete blocks out in the open away from the trees, and builds up a big fire of oak and hickory logs from my wood pile. While I helped him with it last Sunday, he grumbled to me about all the charcoal factories that are springing up around here. They are bringing in money for our woodcutters, but he is an Ozarker born and bred and he said he didn’t like them turning our forests into charcoal briquettes so that people who live in fancy suburbs all over the country can cook on an open fire.

  By the time the fire had burned down to a proper pig-roasting stage, some of the other beekeepers and their families had arrived. It was still a few degrees below the hundred predicted by the weatherman, and those who had driven out from town said the slight breeze up here on my hilltop made it seem a bit cooler.

  Early in the morning I had set up two sawhorses under the oak trees and put a four-by-eight slab of plywood across them. I threw a bedspread over the top as a tablecloth, and stood back to look. It seemed inadequate preparation for a large party, and the table seemed a little bare, so I walked out into the field and picked an armful of Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans, daisies and butterfly weed, and put them in a bottle of water as a centerpiece.

  The beekeepers arrived and their wives began to unpack their baskets. They filled my refrigerator, and put out on the table the food that would not be spoiled by the heat. There were casseroles, salads made fresh from the garden, a basket of newly picked peaches from a home orchard. One wife had been butchering and freezing her flock of chickens the week before, and had saved a couple to fry for us. We all agreed that chickens which are allowed to run and forage some of their own food always taste better than the kind you buy from the grocery store. There were homemade pickles and relishes, lemonade and iced tea in coolers, pies and cakes that had just been taken from the oven on this hot day. I am not much of a cook, so my contribution is always a washtub full of cold beer and ice. There are some teetotalers among the beekeepers, and they had objected to the beer the first year we had the pig roast, but they come back each time so I guess they worked out some kind of accommodation with their principles.

  An interest in bees brings the group together and some of us are friends for other reasons too, but it is a mixed gathering, ranging not only from teetotalers to beer drinkers, but various in other ways as well. Two men are in their eighties and have kept bees all their lives, but there are also young people who have just discovered the pleasures of beekeeping. There are back-to-the-landers with shoulder-length hair and earnest manners, longtime Ozark farmers, the town banker, some schoolteachers and several carpenters. There are retired couples who now have time for a few hives of bees. I am the only commercial beekeeper, the only one who makes my living from it and has a lot of hives. Most of them have a hive or two; a few have ten or twenty. Most of them are men. Nearly all of the women are wives who take an interest in what their husbands like to do.

  The children were eager to go swimming as soon as they arrived, so their parents took them down to the river after they had unpacked the food. Everyone had brought folding lawn chairs, and we set them up in a big circle under the oak trees near the table. Those who didn’t go swimming sat gossiping and talking bees. Some people came back from the river, cool and wet, and others went down, while some of us stayed behind to watch the fire and turn the pig meat. A few of the new beekeepers had never seen my honey house and were curious about it, so I took them out there, demonstrated the machinery and showed them how everything worked.

  By the middle of the afternoon the pig was done and we were all hungry. The women brought the rest of the food out from the refrigerator and arranged it on the table, and we ate as much as we could and then sat in the chairs and talked while the children played. By sunset the temperature had dropped a little, and the wives cleaned up the leftover food. Some of the men carried the plywood and sawhorses back to the barn for me. Families with young children began to leave, but others stayed on.

  We sat under the oak trees in the dusk and watched the fireflies rising up from the grass, wondering why you never saw them in the daytime. We talked about how the price of honey was falling and the cost of bee equipment was rising. In the distance the whippoorwills started calling, and I lost the thread of the talk listening for the odd call among them that I have been hearing lately. I think that it
may be a chuck-will’s-widow, but I don’t know birdsong well enough to be sure, so I interrupted the conversation to ask if any of the others knew. As it turned out, there were none among the group who knew bird calls, but everyone stopped to listen and could tell the difference in the call when I pointed it out. We also could hear the katydids and cicadas all around us, and we talked about them for a while and how they made their sounds with their bodies. Then we talked about how poorly the government price-support program was working for small beekeepers.

  It was late and cool when my guests decided it was time to go home. A gibbous moon lit the way to their pickups, and there were fireflies everywhere. We agreed that it had been one of our better pig roasts. One little boy had cried when my rooster chased him, but other than that everyone had had a good time.

  Last winter was extraordinarily mild, and as a result the chiggers are abundant this summer. Ozark humor is an understated sort of thing, and folks here are asking one another if they happened to attend one of the funerals held for the five chiggers that died during the cold weather.

  Once the timber has been cut from these hills, the thin soil will barely support cattle or hog farming and crops won’t grow here, so many of the clearings and old pastures go to scrubby second growth and blackberries. That kind of cover and the hot steamy summers make it a prime place for chiggers.

  Yesterday a friend of mine from the city was here and went out to pick blackberries for a cobbler. By evening, he was covered with red, ferociously itching chigger bites. They will itch for weeks, although I did not have the heart to tell him so. I was sympathetic because for the first few years I lived here I, too, spent my summers scratching continuously, often in socially unacceptable places. Like many people, after a couple of years I gained a tolerance to them, and so I believe I have now earned the right to take a longer view.

  Bad as chiggers are, they have had a worse press than they deserve because their name so closely resembles that of another pesty being, the chigoe, which is found only in the deep South. Chigoes are insects, tropical fleas that burrow under the skin to lay their eggs; since both chigoes and chiggers are tiny and their names sound so similar, people often confuse them and think that chiggers burrow too. They do not, and they are not insects.

  Chiggers are mites and, like their spiderish kin, have unsegmented bodies and eight legs when they grow up. They belong to the class Arachnida, not Insecta. There are more than seven hundred species of chiggers throughout the world, and of these fewer than fifty feed on humans. In the Orient one variety spreads scrub typhus, but on this continent the worst that they can do is make us itchy. One of our most common species is Trombicula alfreddugesi, a mouthful because it is named for Alfred Dugès, who studied them around the turn of the century. Dugès was a celebrated mite man, but my own favorite chigger expert is James M. Brennan, a government entomologist who once took more than 4,000 chiggers from a single woodchuck in the Bitterroot valley of Montana. Counting out 4,000 tiny chiggers would be an heroic task, and so I was pleased when I read that scientist Brennan had a whole genus named for him.

  From a human standpoint, one of the most significant facts about chiggers is that they are so small we cannot see them and seldom realize they have been feeding on us until we begin to itch like my friend the blackberry picker.

  Adult chiggers, it is true, are quite visible to the naked eye, attaining a whopping one tenth of an inch. Even I, with my middle-aged eyes, sometimes see them. They are bright orangy red, the color of butterfly weed (or chigger plant, as it is called in the Ozarks). When looked at through a hand lens, the mites can be seen to be covered with feathery hairs, and are rather handsome. However, as they feed on plant and animal debris and an occasional tiny insect egg, our paths seldom cross. But they do lay the minute eggs from which larval chiggers hatch, and it is the larvae that we human beings mind so much.

  The eggs, only a hundred microns big, are laid in the soil. Instead of hatching directly, they break open into a second egg, called a deutovum. This second egg hatches the orange larva, a larva so small that it would take a hundred and twenty-five of them, lined up snout to rear, to come up to the inch mark. These larvae must find a meal before they can metamorphose to their next nymphal stage. They crawl up blades of grass, brambles or bushes to find a suitable vertebrate host on which to feed. Their preference would be a lizard, turtle, bird or even a woodchuck; from a chigger’s standpoint, a human is a poor host, but should the mite end up on one, it starts to climb to find a protected spot on which to feed. For this reason chiggers most often choose places where clothing fits tightly, and our itches are usually clustered around the ankles, crotch, waist and armpits. Some Ozarkers swear that the best way to avoid getting “chigger bit” is to conduct one’s outdoor activities stark naked. Presumably the chiggers would then wander up one side of the body and down the other, discouraged by finding no suitable spot on which to feed. I have never nerved myself to plunge into a blackberry thicket naked, so I cannot report if this is true.

  Once a larval chigger has found a good location, he settles down for a feed. Technically speaking, chiggers do not bite at all; their mouth parts are too delicate. Instead, they inject a digestive enzyme into the skin which dissolves a bit of flesh; the chigger then sucks it up. Chiggers are not interested in blood, but feed on liquefied skin and lymph. If left undisturbed, the chigger stays in the same place, using the enzyme to make a small well or tube called a stylostome. If the larva can stay on his host long enough to have a full feed—about three days—he drops off when engorged and crawls to a protected place on the ground, where he rests and prepares to undergo transformation. Inside, his body parts melt down and reconstitute themselves into a legless, pupa-like protonymph, which in turn changes into an active deutonymph, a predator like the adult he eventually will become. The change from nymph to adult is also in two stages. Once again the chigger settles quietly, while within tissue dissolves and reforms into a legless, pupa-like tritonymph or pre-adult, which does not move, but from which emerges the adult, the bright-red, velvety, sexually mature chigger.

  All of which is most elegant and complex, but easily the most curious thing about chiggers from a human standpoint is our own reaction to them. When a chigger commences to feed on us, our bodies overreact by setting off a full battalion of allergy alarm bells, making us itch and scratch. It is actually an overreaction, because it serves no purpose either for us or for the chigger. Those of us who have happily developed a tolerance to chiggers serve as calm, nonscratching chigger hosts. And the chigger is not served by provoking that allergy either. The allergic reaction caused by the venom of the honeybee sting preserves the bee colony and its food stores, but when a chigger provokes an allergic reaction, we scratch it off before it has fed its fill and usually kill it in the process.

  Mulling over this curiosity, G. W. Krantz, an eminent acarologist, says, “… the intense itching reaction experienced by man … reflects a lack of host adaptation.” In other words, it is all a Terrible Mistake.

  This is one of those biological puzzles that I find cheering—untidy, unresolved, a reminder that the results are not yet all in, that we do not have the final forms, nor all the answers. We are still in process, chiggers, humans and the rest. There are probably better answers somewhere on down the pike.

  I keep twenty hives of bees here in my home beeyard, but most of my hives are scattered in outyards across the Ozarks, where I can find the thickest stands of wild blackberries and other good things for bees. I always have a waiting list of farmers who would like the bees on their land, for the clover in their pastures is more abundant when the bees are there to pollinate it.

  One of the farmers, a third-generation Ozarker and a dairyman with a lively interest in bees, came over today for a look at what my neighbors call my honey factory. My honey house contains a shiny array of stainless-steel tanks with clear plastic tubing connecting them, a power uncapper for slicing open honeycomb, an extractor for spinning honey out of th
e comb, and a lot of machinery and equipment that whirs, thumps, hums and looks very special. The dairyman, shrewd in mountain ways, looked it all over carefully and then observed, “Well … ll … ll, wouldn’t say for sure now, but it looks like a still to me.”

  There have been droughty years and cold wet ones when flowers refused to bloom and I would have been better off with a still back up here on my mountain top, but the weather this past year was perfect from a bee’s standpoint, and this August I ran 33,000 pounds of honey through my factory. This was nearly twice the normal crop, and everything was overloaded, starting with me. Neither I nor my equipment is set up to handle this sort of harvest, even with extra help.

  I always need to hire someone, a strong young man who is not afraid of being stung, to help me harvest the honey from the hives.

  The honey I take is the surplus that the bees will not need for the winter; they store it above their hives in wooden boxes called supers. To take it from them, I stand behind each hive with a gasoline-powered machine called a beeblower and blow the bees out of the supers with a jet of air. Meanwhile, the strong young man carries the supers, which weigh about sixty pounds each, and stacks them on pallets in the truck. There may be thirty to fifty supers in every outyard, and we have only about half an hour to get them off the hives, stacked and covered before the bees get really cross about what we are doing. The season to take the honey in this part of the country is summer’s end, when the temperature is often above ninety-five degrees. The nature of the work and the temper of the bees require that we wear protective clothing while doing the job: a full set of coveralls, a zippered bee veil and leather gloves. Even a very strong young man works up a considerable sweat wrapped in a bee suit in hot weather hustling sixty-pound supers—being harassed by angry bees at the same time.