Story Time!

[MaxPC]

When a child, I dodged Nazi bombs.

I was on a boat that sank and had to tread water until help came (no, dear Watson, it was NOT the HMS Titanic ).

Later in life I helped to break a herd of feral hogs.

Yesterday, I twisted an ankle trying to skip rope with the great grandchild.

[Sudsy]

When a child, I dodged Nazi bombs.

I was on a boat that sank and had to tread water until help came (no, dear Watson, it was NOT the HMS Titanic ).

Later in life I helped to break a herd of feral hogs.

Yesterday, I twisted an ankle trying to skip rope with the great grandchild.

I believe the first 3 stories but this last one about you trying to skip rope at your age, I'm having trouble with.

Been there, done that sort of thing myself lately and suffered for it.

[Soloist]

When a child, I dodged Nazi bombs.

I was on a boat that sank and had to tread water until help came (no, dear Watson, it was NOT the HMS Titanic ).

Later in life I helped to break a herd of feral hogs.

Yesterday, I twisted an ankle trying to skip rope with the great grandchild.

I believe the first 3 stories but this last one about you trying to skip rope at your age, I'm having trouble with.

Been there, done that sort of thing myself lately and suffered for it.

Well… he didn’t say he was successful and he claimed he suffered for it.
The nazi bomb thing sound like typical childhood exaggeration.
As for the breaking of the herd… he is saying he likes bacon.
You just have to read between the lines here.

[Sudsy]

When a child, I dodged Nazi bombs.

I was on a boat that sank and had to tread water until help came (no, dear Watson, it was NOT the HMS Titanic ).

Later in life I helped to break a herd of feral hogs.

Yesterday, I twisted an ankle trying to skip rope with the great grandchild.

I believe the first 3 stories but this last one about you trying to skip rope at your age, I'm having trouble with.

Been there, done that sort of thing myself lately and suffered for it.

Well… he didn’t say he was successful and he claimed he suffered for it.
The nazi bomb thing sound like typical childhood exaggeration.
As for the breaking of the herd… he is saying he likes bacon.
You just have to read between the lines here.

I think MaxPC knows my trouble believing the last story was not serious. That is what the was for.

[Ken]

Wife: Youch! This is what the Peace Corps does in other countries? Sending murderous killer bees after hostile armies? I think I’d rather face a firing squad. Were you all in white bee suits? My phone isn’t loading the picture so I’ll have to wait till I can use the laptop.

I posted a hot link to an old Google Photos album that apparently doesn't display here for everyone. So here it is copied to Flickr.

Yes, I was MAGA long before MAGA was cool. "Ministerio de Agricultura, Ganadaria, y Alimetacion" which translates to "Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Food" Yes we were wearing white bee suits but not the hats and veils inside the truck with the windows up.

Guatemala had a pretty extensive rural ag extension program back in the 1980s. I think a lot of it was US funded. But it mostly atrophied and died after US interest in Central America was diverted away to the middle east and "war on terror" after 9-11 and many subsequent and corrupt governments in Guatemala stopped paying attention to rural economic development.

[Soloist]

Wife: Youch! This is what the Peace Corps does in other countries? Sending murderous killer bees after hostile armies? I think I’d rather face a firing squad. Were you all in white bee suits? My phone isn’t loading the picture so I’ll have to wait till I can use the laptop.

I posted a hot link to an old Google Photos album that apparently doesn't display here for everyone. So here it is copied to Flickr.

Yes, I was MAGA long before MAGA was cool. "Ministerio de Agricultura, Ganadaria, y Alimetacion" which translates to "Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Food" Yes we were wearing white bee suits but not the hats and veils inside the truck with the windows up.

Guatemala had a pretty extensive rural ag extension program back in the 1980s. I think a lot of it was US funded. But it mostly atrophied and died after US interest in Central America was diverted away to the middle east and "war on terror" after 9-11 and many subsequent and corrupt governments in Guatemala stopped paying attention to rural economic development.

Wife: yeah, that story just gives me the heebee-jeebees though. Tens of thousands of bees! Are they really as killer as everyone says they are?

[Ken]

Wife: yeah, that story just gives me the heebee-jeebees though. Tens of thousands of bees! Are they really as killer as everyone says they are?

They look just like the ordinary Italian honeybees which are the sort we are used to seeing here. You have to use a microscope and know what to look for to tell any difference. No honeybees are native to the western hemisphere (there are wild native bees but they are more like bumblebees and don't make big hives of honey). European honeybees were brought to the new word by the Spanish, mainly for production of wax for candles in addition to honey. But the traditional European bees don't seem to do as well in really tropical climates so a researcher in Brazil back in the 1950s brought some African strains over to Brazil to experiment with and see if he could breed more robust bees for tropical climates. His African bees escaped his lab and have been multiplying, interbreeding with local bees and moving north ever since.

They are significantly more aggressive (or defensive) than regular European bees. So if you agitate a hive you might get thousands pouring out to defend it rather than a few dozen with a European hive. This is an adaptation from Africa where bees faced much more aggressive natural predators than in Europe.

The problem is that Africanized drone bees are also substantially more aggressive than European drones, so if you have an apiary, when your queen bees go on mating flights they are going to be hounded and surrounded by wild African drones from the surrounding forest rather than the domesticated drones from your own hive. So if you have an apiary of 50 hives and do nothing, they might all convert to African in one season. We did surveys in the Guatemalan forests and estimated that there were on average about 500 wild swarms and wild hives of Africanized bees per square kilometer of forest or farm land. So you can imagine the impossibility of blocking them. The project started out by setting up cardboard bee swarm traps along roadsides to try to trap swarms but it was a pointless and futile effort since bees don't follow roads. Although it did allow us to collect data on the rate of their advance.

Are they dangerous? Yes if they are kept in populated areas. We had to deal with an endless stream of bee attacks and much of our effort was training local folks on how to deal with wild swarms of bees (put on a bee suit and backpack sprayer full of malathion and climb up a tree or ladder to douse them with insecticide).

The problem in Guatemala was that beekeepers traditionally kept their hives in their back yards or on the edges of populated areas where they could keep an eye on them. With tame European bees this was not generally a problem. But when their hives converted over to African it was. They stories were always similar. A pig knocks over a beehive in someone's yard, the bees go nuts and sting all the neighbors and someone dies of anaphylactic shock. And so we had to go in and kill the hive and then see if we could help the beekeeper move his hives to a safer location. Very often it was wild swarms that would build a hive in local trees or buildings near people and the same thing would happen and we'd have to go kill them and rip them out. I have lots of stories about that.

Here in the US the honey industry is completely different. Hives are generally located out in remote agricultural areas and not in densely populated towns. and American beekeepers continually replace their queens with lab-bred queens produced by agricultural supply companies so they control the genetics of their own bees. There was no such industry in Guatemala. There are wild swarms of Africanized bees in the lower latitudes of the US, places like Arizona and Texas. But the are generally not that much of a problem. And local pest control companies eradiate them when found in populated areas just like fire ants and other pests. They tend not to overwinter well compared to European bees so they haven't progressed north into areas that see actual winters.

[Robert]

I was once arrested for shoplifting in the store I worked in...

[MaxPC]

When a child, I dodged Nazi bombs.

I was on a boat that sank and had to tread water until help came (no, dear Watson, it was NOT the HMS Titanic ).

Later in life I helped to break a herd of feral hogs.

Yesterday, I twisted an ankle trying to skip rope with the great grandchild.

I believe the first 3 stories but this last one about you trying to skip rope at your age, I'm having trouble with.

Been there, done that sort of thing myself lately and suffered for it.

I could not resist that sweet 6 year-old face.

I can still remember the smell of that bomb shelter where we had to go whenever the blitz sirens sounded. Not my favorite memory needless to say.

[Sudsy]

I shot a 69, 2 under par, in a local Golf Tournament. But that might not be too meaningful here as I suspect the golfers here are few. Also shot my age at age 71. Done with one good arm and one prosthetic arm. A legend in my own mind.