Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 9 · column 4 of 9 · from the scan, no model involved
By THERESA REYNOLDS
Rappahannock Newa Staff Writer
For forty years, Haywood Pullen has been keeping bees in back of his home at Rose Hill farm. Before that, he lived just down the road at the old toll gate house where his grandfather, Rob Brady, collected tolls for wagons and horses traveling on the old road.
His reason for keeping bees is simple: Haywood Pullen likes honey. He gets about twenty-five dozen quarts a year from his eighty hives and sells them from his home starting in late summer. "I don’t know that much about bees,” Pullen said, “just what I’ve picked up over the years.”
Whatever information Pullen hasn’t picked up in his years of beekeeping doesn’t seem worth knowing. He’s also invented a couple of gadgets that make his bee operation simpler.
Pullen keeps his hives in several long rows a few feet apart in a small fenced yard, so the air is thick with buzzing honey bees. Pullen seldom gets stung: “Don’t stay still for too long • keep moving. And don’t swat at a bee. Once you hit at him, he’ll keep after you til you have to kill him.”
How does the bee know which of the eighty identical hives is his? Pullen laughed. “I’ve always wondered how city folks know which apartment is theirs. Guess it’s the same for bees. They just know.”
This week the bees are gathering honey from locust blooms, cress blossoms, dandelions, and wild strawberry flowers. "I don’t feed mine this time of year,” Pullen said. “As long as the sun is shining they can get food. If I have a new hive that hasn’t had time to store food. I’ll feed it on a cold day—I just set out some old honey jars and they clean them up for me.
“Once a honeybee freezes, that’s it. That’s why they don’t go out in the cold. They stay inside in a knot—keep each other warm. In weak swarm some will die from cold—the ones on the outside, qf. the knot, l ean tell when K happens because the other bees push them out.”
Pullen said that he checks them from time to time in the winter. “You poke a stick in and hear him roar—you know he’s in there.”
To prepare his hives, Pullen fixes racks for honey storage with a honeycomb base. “The trick is to have him build his comb the way I want him to, not the way he wants to,” Pullen either extends the wax base across each rectangular frame or just part way down. “These honeycombs are so expensive, I usually just give the bees enough to start off right.” To prevent the bees from working on first one rack and then another, Pullen separates his honeycombs with plywood boards.
For honey he wants to sell in the comb, Pullen uses a different kind of rack with small square sections. Each section will be a perfect little honeycomb.
The racks can be pulled out from the top of the hive. Pullen has some frames he's bought and also many that he made himself from pine or poplar. “A lot of these things I’ve never read about. I've just sort of made up things as I go along.”
Pullen puts “caps” (supers) on his hives around this time of year when the bees are doing well. The cap is another box full of racks that the bees work on after they fill the hive.
“If the bees have filled up their gum, (hive) and one cap
88.4%