A Country Year Living The Questions – Sue Hubbell

I often see them in the summer when their brood-rearing is at its peak, flying low over the ground or around tree trunks looking for prey. When they find a caterpillar, they do not sting it but butcher it alive. First the hornet kneads the caterpillar with her mandibles to soften the muscles and other tissues, then cuts it up with her mouth. She swallows the liquid parts herself, and forms the solid parts into pellets which she carries back to the nest.

Here nurse hornets take over the bits of flesh to break into still smaller morsels with which to feed the developing brood. Considering that there may be 10,000 hornets in one of the big nests, the requirements of a single colony may serve as a considerable check on destructive caterpillars in an orchard.

A number of nests should cheer an orchardist. Bald-faced hornets, Vespula maculata (vespa is Latin for wasp and maculata means spotted), are big stout insects, three quarters of an inch long, black with whitish yellow markings on the head, thorax and abdomen. A mated female who overwinters on the ground under a bit of leaf litter or stone starts a new colony afresh each spring, chewing up pieces of wood to make the papery material she needs to construct a small, hanging starter nest of closely arranged cells in which she lays the first eggs.

The tubular cells are covered with another protective layer of the same gray, papery material. The first eggs develop into workers, sterile females. They enlarge the nest and start killing caterpillars for the next generation. By summer’s end, males, who grow from unfertilized eggs and lack stingers, are born, and they fertilize a new generation of females. In the autumn all of them die except for the fertilized females, who abandon the nest for better protection against winter’s cold.

There are three big windows that go from floor to ceiling on the south side of my cabin. I like to sit in the brown leather chair in the twilight of winter evenings and watch birds at the feeder that stretches across them. The windows were a gift from my husband before he left the last time.

He had come and gone before, and we were not sure that this would be the last time, although I suspected that it was. I have lived here in the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri for twelve years now, and for most of that time I have been alone. I have learned to run a business that we started together, a commercial beekeeping and honey- producing operation, a shaky, marginal sort of affair that never quite leaves me free of money worries but which allows me to live in these hills that I love.

My share of the Ozarks is unusual and striking. My farm lies two hundred and fifty feet above a swift, showy river to the north and a small creek to the south, its run broken by waterfalls. Creek and river join just to the east, so I live on a peninsula of land. The back fifty acres are covered with second-growth timber, and I take my firewood there.

Last summer when I was cutting firewood, I came across a magnificent black walnut, tall and straight, with no jutting branches to mar its value as a timber tree. I don’t expect to sell it, although even a single walnut so straight and unblemished would fetch a good price, but I cut some trees near it to give it room.

The botanic name for black walnut is Juglans nigra—“Black Nut Tree of God,” a suitable name for a tree of such dignity, and I wanted to give it space. Over the past twelve years I have learned that a tree needs space to grow, that coyotes sing down by the creek in January, that I can drive a nail into oak only when it is green, that bees know more about making honey than I do, that love can become sadness, and that there are more questions than answers.

1kitap1.com/en SPRING 1kitap1.com/en The river to the north of my place is claimed by the U.S. Park Service, and the creek to the south is under the protection of the Missouri State Conservation Department, so I am surrounded by government land. The deed to the property says my farm is a hundred and five acres, but it is probably something more like ninety.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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• Language: English (en)

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