Bees: The Drone Frames Really Do Work

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A component of my integrated pest management system.

I started my beekeeping hobby in June 2013 and have been blogging about it periodically. If you’re interested in reading the other posts in this series, follow the Adventures in Beekeeping tag. Keep in mind that the most recent posts always appear first on this blog.

A while back, I installed a so-called “drone frame” in two of my beehives. A drone frame is a special frame with large cells embossed on a plastic foundation. The bees supposedly see this frame, realize that the big cells will be perfect for drones (which are larger than workers), build out the cells for drones. The queen lays drone eggs in each cell and the workers feed and cap them like any other drone cell. Varroa mites, which prefer drone brood, enter the cells before capping and do their parasitic mite thing — including laying eggs — on the drone larvae. The drones hatch and carry more mites into the hive to mix with the other brood.

Varroa mites are a bad thing for beehives and supposedly every beehive in North America has them. Not only does their blood sucking weaken the bees and possibly cause deformities in newly hatched bees, but they have been tied to colony collapse disorder (CCD), which has been getting a lot of press lately because of it’s potential to do serious harm to the food chain humans rely on for survival.

I checked the drone frame each time I opened my main hive. I try to inspect my hives every 10-14 days. The first time I looked there was no activity. The bees didn’t seem interested in the frame. The second time I looked, the bees had begun to draw out comb. A good sign. The next time I looked, the frame had been partially filled with capped and uncapped honey as well as a good number of capped drone cells.

That was August 11. I was unprepared. I should have brought along a second drone frame so I could have swapped them out. The idea with the drone frames is to remove the frame once it contains capped drone cells and to put it in the freezer for a few days. This kills the drone larvae as well as the mites. (Drones don’t do anything except fertilize the queens — kind of like some men I know — and my queens were already fertilized.) After a while, you put the frame back in the hive, the workers see the dead bees and clean them out, and the queen lays new eggs.

I went back with an empty drone frame only five days later. I was late. The drones had already begun to hatch. In fact, more than half of them were gone. Others were hatching as I watched.

Drone Frame
Here’s the drone frame as it looked today after a week in the freezer. You can see the capped cells where drones were emerging. The dark empty cells are where the other drones hatched from. There’s honey along the top of the frame. The reverse side looks pretty much the same.

I have to admit that it made me sad to do what I had to do.

I brushed the workers and newly hatched drones off the drone frame and back into the hive. Then I put the drone frame aside and replaced it with a brand new one. I have four of them and three hives so if I time everything right, I’ll only have one in the freezer at any time; I’ll just keep circulating the freezer one to replace the one I pull in a hive.

I put the drone frame in the back of my truck and went on with my day. I secretly hoped the drones would all hatch and fly away. I didn’t want to kill them.

But the next day, when I inspected the frame, I found that many of the drones had half emerged and died there. I also saw the mites — they were quite easy to spot with my glasses on. There were a lot of them.

Varroa Mites on a Drone Frame
Here’s a closeup of some of the cells in the drone frame. Although my camera focused on the outer edges of the cells, you can clearly see the dead mites. The bottom-right cell has a dead drone bee that died while emerging from its cell. If I’d waited just one more day, they all would have hatched.

I put the frame in a plastic bag and stowed it in my landlord’s freezer. (I wonder if he noticed.)

I spoke to another beekeeper at a recent meeting of the North Central Washington Beekeepers Association. I admitted how I’d screwed up by pulling the drone frame late. He made me feel a little better when he admitted that he’d done the same thing.

This afternoon I pulled the drone frame out to take some photos. Tomorrow, I’ll bring it to my hives. I’ll check the second hive with a drone frame to see if there’s any capped drone cells in it. If there’s any, I’ll pull it and replace it with this one. Otherwise, I’ll put this one in the one hive that doesn’t yet have a drone frame at all.

I suspect that my mite problem is worse that it should be. I also ordered a miticide from the bee supply place. I need to get the mites under control before winter sets in. My friend Don blames the loss of his hive last winter on mites. I’d like to beat the odds of a 50% winter survival rate here in Central Washington and have all three hives make it through the winter.

Wish me luck!

Bees: Mid-August Update

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I thought I’d take a moment to bring readers up-to-date on my bees and their hives.

I started my beekeeping hobby in June 2013 and have been blogging about it periodically. If you’re interested in reading the other posts in this series, follow the Adventures in Beekeeping tag. Keep in mind that the most recent posts always appear first on this blog.

I haven’t blogged about my bees in almost a month. That’s because there hasn’t been anything terribly interesting happening with them. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to report.

Hive Move

I have a total of three hives. Two of them were with me where I’m camped out along the side of Squilchuck Canyon in Wenatchee Heights. The third (which was really my first) was at a fellow beekeeper’s house in Wenatchee.

The one in Wenatchee was doing great. So great that they filled seven frames of a deep hive box with capped honey. I extracted honey from six of those frames in July and got a total of about 2-1/2 gallons of honey. I replaced that deep hive box with a medium box and 10 new frames for the bees to continue making honey.

I used the deep hive box that had been on that productive hive as a home for the new hive I’d created a few days before via a hive split. The bees had been living in a nuc box until I could get a deep hive body for them. I set them up in Wenatchee Heights beside the hive I’d created by catching a swarm earlier in the season. I divided the extracted frames and partially filled frames between those two hives, removing any empty frames I had. The bees, I knew, would clean the beeswax cells of those frames and start using them for brood or honey storage. At least that was the idea.

As I discovered on two subsequent hive inspections, however, the bees weren’t producing much honey at all. They cleaned out those sticky frames very quickly, but didn’t refill the cells. One look around the area made it pretty clear why: there simply weren’t enough flowering plants to give them the food source they needed. Even though I was feeding them regularly with a 1:1 sugar water solution, they just weren’t making a noticeable amount of honey.

My beekeeping friend, Jim, confirmed this when he and his wife came over for dinner one night. He suggested that I move the hives down to his place with my other one. He had lots of clover in his grass and there were plenty of gardens in the area. A much better source of food.

My Three Hives
My beehives are currently in a friend’s backyard.

So one late July evening, after the bees had gone in for the night, I stuffed rags in the hive entrances to lock them in and used ratchet tie-down straps to secure the bottoms and tops to the two boxes. In the morning, I loaded them onto my pickup truck and drove them down to Jim’s place. I set up some scrap wood to form a platform and positioned the two hives side by side on it. Then I removed the rags, added sugar water to two feeders, and left them.

At this point, all three of my beehives are in Jim’s backyard in Wenatchee.

I have to admit that I’m a bit worried about how they’ll fare when I move them to my future home in Malaga. Although the property is full of wildflowers in the spring and early summer, in late summer it’s about the same as Wenatchee Heights. I suspect that I’ll be feeding my bees quite a bit until my gardens are established.

The Main Hive

I’ll always consider my first hive my “main hive” simply because it’s the healthiest and most active. But I noticed a definite decline in honey production since extracting honey in July and replacing brood frames in the bottom hive body with empty frames when I made my hive split.

Indeed, the bees have yet to produce any comb or store any honey in the medium box that’s now their second level. And it’s been about three weeks.

Yesterday I did an exhaustive hive inspection. Although I didn’t see the queen, I did see fresh brood. And I was very pleased to see that they had begun putting brood in the drone frame. I could kick myself — I should have brought along a fresh drone frame to replace it with. I’ll have to go back sometime this week to do that; the idea is to freeze the frames with drone brood in them as part of a varroa mite prevention strategy. Of course, the frame won’t fit into my RV’s freezer. But there is a freezer in my “landlord’s” garage; I’ll ask if I can store it there.

I removed the queen excluder and Ross Rounds box from that hive to store them for the winter. There’s no way they’ll fill the Ross Rounds before autumn comes. At this point, I doubt they’ll fill the medium frame.

The Hive Split Hive

I blogged about my risky hive split back in July. The way I did the split was admittedly haphazard. I pulled brood frames that included swarm cells out of my main hive and put them in a nuc box with all the bees that were on them. Then I moved them away from the main hive with hopes that a swarm cell would hatch into a queen and the hive would continue. I also hoped that the queen was not among the bees I moved.

I was certain I had failed. The hive was not very active and didn’t seem to be growing. It certainly wasn’t producing much (if any) honey, as I reported above. Every time I inspected it, I’d look hard for a queen or eggs in cells. I did see developing and capped brood but never saw anything fresher.

But in yesterday’s hive inspection, I did something I never did before: I wore my reading glasses. Yes, I’m of “that age” when glasses are necessary to bring tiny things into focus. And what’s tinier than a bee egg?

Surprise, surprise! Not only did I see freshly hatched eggs, but I also spotted a queen. My risky hive split had been a success!

Now if only they’d start storing honey for the winter.

The Swarm Hive

I thought the swarm hive might have stored enough honey for me to add a medium hive body with frames to it. I even brought the hive body with me and unboxed it prior to making my inspection. But the bees simply aren’t working hard enough. There are plenty of empty areas in the frames in their deep hive body. Adding another box on top might coax them into storing honey in the top box before they’d filled the bottom one. I needed to wait.

I also checked the drone frame I’d put on that box. They’re just starting to build out comb. So I’m not very sure how effective the drone frames are for mite control. It seems that the bees are slow to accept them.

Prepping for the Winter

I know it’s only August and the summer’s hottest days are barely behind us. But I do need to plan ahead for the winter. That means ensuring that the bees store up enough honey to feed themselves during the coldest months. This will be especially important since I plan to spend much of the winter traveling and won’t be around to feed them.

With luck, however, I’ll find a good, sheltered spot for them on my new property. That’s one of the chores I face in the months ahead.

Cherry Drying: My Sixth Season

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The whole season in summary.

I’m just finished up my sixth season as a cherry drying pilot in North Central Washington’s Wenatchee area. I thought I’d take a moment to summarize how things went.

What Cherry Drying is All About

I’ve blogged about this extensively and you can quickly zip to other cherry drying related posts by following the cherry drying tag. In a nutshell, it’s like this:

Split Cherries
These Rainier cherries are split and cannot be sold. Cherry drying by helicopter can prevent this.

During the last three or so weeks before a cherry is harvested it is susceptible to damage by rain. Growers are most worried by splits, which can occur when water accumulates in the cherry’s stem cup and is absorbed through the skin. The cherries get too fat for their own skin and split. Other damage can include mildew and rotting.

Because of this, growers want to get the cherries as dry as possible after a rain. So they hire helicopter pilots to hover over the cherry trees after it rains. The downwash of the helicopter’s main rotor blades shakes the water off the leaves and cherries, allowing them to dry much quicker without absorbing so much water.

Keeping the cherries dry is vitally important for a successful crop — as this year so clearly demonstrated. During the relatively short cherry season, dozens of helicopters are on standby with pilots waiting to fly when it rains. And when the rains start falling, all hell breaks loose over the cherry trees.

The Flying M Air Team

One of the things I pride myself on is the ability to provide prompt service and quick dry times to my clients. I do this by never contracting to cover more than 100 acres per helicopter and by utilizing helicopters well-suited to cherry drying missions. Because of this 100 acres/helicopter policy, I need to contract with additional helicopter crews to help out during “crunch times.”

Robinson R44
I’ve been providing cherry drying services in my Robinson R44 since 2008.

My Robinson R44 can thoroughly dry an average of 40 acres per hour. (Of course, actual drying capacity varies depending on tree size, row density, orchard obstacles and terrain, and the wetness of the trees. The more I dry, the better feel I have developed for all this.) That means that if it rained on all my clients at once and they all called at the same time, I could dry 100 acres in about 2-1/2 hours. That’s a long time, but still within requirements. Fortunately, it seldom rains everywhere at once and I’ve never had all my clients call at once.

Of course, I do contract for more than 100 acres at a time. That means I need help to get the jobs done promptly. This was the second year in a row that I had two other helicopter crews helping me complete my cherry drying contracts.

MTAS Hiller
The MTAS Hiller was on contract with Flying M Air for its second year.

Mike and Ron manned the MTAS Hiller for the second year in a row. For the first four weeks of their contract with me, they covered three orchards in Quincy, WA. For the fifth and final week, they provided backup coverage for orchards in East Wenatchee and Wenatchee Heights.

Canyon State Hughes 300
Woody at the controls of Canyon State’s Hughes 300.

Woody manned the Canyon State Hughes 300 for the first time. He was on contract with me for just 8 days during what I think of as a “super crunch” time when overlapping contracts made me responsible for about 250 acres of cherry trees. Although I prefer working with helicopters that have big two-bladed systems — such as the Robinson R44, Hiller, Bell 47, and JetRanger — this little Hughes got the job done using the Flying M Air technique of flying very low and very slow over the treetops. If Woody does come back next year, however, he’ll likely return in either a Hiller or R44.

If you’re a helicopter owner/operator with an R44 and at least 500 hours experience in helicopters (50 or more of which is in your R44), you might want to check the Help Wanted page at Flying M Air next spring. I’m always looking for good, reliable pilots with helicopters to help out.

Old Clients, New Orchards

This year, I contracted with all of last year’s clients except one. He decided to skip helicopter services. That was a loss of 55 acres. (Not sure how he did because I didn’t ask.)

Two of my clients added orchards to their contracts. One added three orchards totaling 61 acres. Another added one orchard that was 23 acres.

So I had a net gain of 31 acres. If I hadn’t lost that 55 acres, I would have had to hire on another helicopter without enough standby pay to cover it, so it’s kind of good that I lost it.

My contracted orchards stretched from George, WA to Monitor, WA. Most were in Quincy, Wenatchee Heights, and Malaga. The crunch time fell from June 20 through July 24, with super crunch falling in the middle of July.

I was based at Quincy for the first half of my season and then moved to Wenatchee Heights for the second half.

Busy, Busy!

This was our busiest season ever. My teammates and I flew a total of about 62 hours for the total of 16 weeks we were contracted (10 for me, 5 for MTAS, and 1 for Canyon State).

Now if you do the math, you’ll find that 62 ÷ 16 comes out to just about 3.9 hours per week. That’s not very much flying. But still, it was the most we’ve flown in a cherry season. My first two years I flew only 5 hours in 7 weeks (less than 1 hour per week average) and 5 hours in 10 weeks (about 1/2 hour per week average). There’s not a lot of flying in cherry drying work. It’s definitely not a time-building job.

Cherry Drying Action Photo
Here I am in action, hovering with my skids nearly in the trees.

The busiest time was what I refer to as the week from hell. It was the last week in June and I personally flew almost 30 hours in just 6 days. On several of those days I dried more than one orchard three or four times. I flew orchard after orchard, sometimes stopping only long enough to refuel and head back out.

I wasn’t happy about it.

Yes, I like to fly because I make money doing it. But no, I don’t like my clients to be put through the wringer by the weather, worrying and spending money on my services and still losing cherries because there’s simply no way to keep them dry when it rains all day long. So yes, I hope I never have another cherry season as busy as this one. My clients, for the most part, are too nice.

As for my competition, they were flying around like crazy people, too. I heard them all on the radio, playing follow the leader to guide unprepared pilots to the orchard blocks that needed drying. Some operators will contract for blocks as small as 2 and 3 acres, so their pilots often spend more time flying from orchard to orchard — without compensation — than actually drying. I’d rather take contracts for a small handful of big orchard blocks so I spend more time over the trees than in transit.

Early, Compressed Season

This was also the earliest season ever. My first contract started May 29; it usually starts the end of the first week in June. And my last contract ended by August 10; last year, it ran until August 25.

It was also a compressed season. Estimated start dates for mid to late season orchards, which were provided at the beginning of the season, creeped forward little by little, causing an uncomfortable overlap in scheduling — which is why I brought Woody’s company on board. That explains how my season started a week earlier than usual and ended two weeks earlier.

Late Season Rain

We also had an unusual amount of late season rain. Indeed, many growers don’t bother getting helicopter standby coverage because it so seldom rains in late July and August. But this year it did. Huge rainstorms hit on the evening of August 1, the morning of August 2, and the evening of August 4. I made five flights, covering my contracted orchard five times and another orchard three times (at my client’s request).

It was a good thing I did. My client reported that on the day of the last storm, I was one of only two helicopters flying in the area. While the packing plant reported minimal splits for his cherries, other orchards that did not have helicopter hover service reported up to 50% splits.

Maybe some lessons were learned? I guess we’ll see next year.

That’s It In a Nutshell

That’s pretty much how the season went for me.

It was my best season ever — but will it be as good next year? Or will we have a bad crop and lose contracts due to frost — as was the case in 2008? Or not have many rain events — as was the case in 2008 through 2010? Or will some upstart company come in and undercut operators like me by taking contracts for as many as 300 acres per helicopter at half the standby pay, crossing their fingers that it doesn’t rain and they’re not actually called to dry? That’s happened more than a few times in the past and those fly-by-night operators never seem to come back for a second season.

It’s all a gamble, a crap shoot. It’s why I don’t put all my eggs in one basket, why I save as much as I can for leaner days when the revenue just isn’t flowing.

But that’s just part of being a small helicopter operator. I love the challenge — especially when things work out just right.

Week One as a Landowner

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Getting a lot done by myself.

Here's My SignAs I blogged last week, I finally purchased that 10-acre view lot in Malaga, WA that I’ve been wanting for over a year. And I wasted no time getting started on turning that piece of land into my next home.

Utilities

One of the great things about this lot is that it already has important utilities on it. It’s just a matter of getting them set up and turned on.

  • Water
    Water was the easiest of the utilities. I have “city water” meaning that the water is provided by Malaga Water District. No well or pump to share or maintain. A water pipe comes out of the ground and has a spigot handle on top. According to the water guy, the pipe is designed for cold weather use; the pipe drains when the water is turned off so winterization isn’t necessary. When my building is constructed, the plumber will tap into this pipe below ground and run the water line in a trench to the building. Until then, I can simply fasten a hose to the pipe.
    Getting the water turned on was easy. I made one call to tell them I wanted it turned on. They sent me a contract that I received the same day — such is the benefit of living in a small town where the utility guy drops off a stamped envelope at the post office and the postmaster puts it right in your post office box. I filled out the contract, put a deposit check in the envelope, and mailed it back. Two days later, they called to tell me the water was turned on.
  • Electricity
    Electricity is a bit more involved. Because there’s no building on the property, I need temporary service set up by an electrician. He then submits an application to the Chelan Public Utility District (PUD) and when they approve it, they turn on power. Later, when my building is constructed and wired, I’ll go through another process to get electricity turned on there.
    Fortunately, there’s already a transformer on my lot so it won’t cost a thing — at least not payable to the PUD — to turn on temporary power. It will, however, cost about $500 to have a temporary power post with plugs and circuit breakers installed and left on my lot for a year. The post is a rental; I could buy one if I needed it for a longer period of time. I’ll have it set up with 2 110v outlets, a 30 amp outlet, and a 50 amp outlet. That’ll make it easy to plug in just about anything, including power tools and my RV.
    So far, I’ve had one bid on the temporary power pole. I should get another bid on Sunday. Once I choose an electrician, the power should be turned on within a week.
  • Fiber

    Not Fiber Optic Cable
    I have enough phone cable to wire the entire neighborhood.

    Fiber is the tough one. Although I thought the cable coming out of the ground near my electric transformer box was fiber optic cable, it’s really telephone cable. Who wants that?
    Fortunately, fiber optic cable already runs down my road past my lot. And a conduit for fiber optic cable has already been put in place between the source on the road and a spot near my transformer. So all I need is for the Chelan PUD to run the cable down into the conduit and the local internet service provider, LocalTel, to set up service.
    The PUD guy who checked my transformer box told me that dropping the cable is an easy job. Unfortunately, there’s backlog and it could take several months for the drop to be done. I did what I could: I got myself on the list so I’d eventually get service.
    And the service is definitely worth waiting for! 100Mbps download and upload speeds. That’s 100 times the speed I had in Wickenburg and 20 times the speed I had in Phoenix.
    LocalTel also offers television service, which I may get. It depends on what kind of DVR they’ll make available. I don’t watch much television and I certainly won’t watch live television. Life’s too short to sit through commercials.

Septic System

Septic System Plan
A good portion of the septic system design preparation work was already done.

The property’s previous owner had been preparing to build on the lot. That’s one of the reasons it has utilities as discussed above. They’d even gone so far as to begin work on a septic system. In fact, they’d already done a percolation test (or perk test) to test the suitability of the land for a septic system. That was good news for me. It meant that if I put my septic system in the same place the designer had tested for, I didn’t need to get another perk test. That would save me about $300 and at least a week.

Of course, I didn’t really want the septic system where the original owner wanted it. But I did want to save money on a perk test and I definitely wanted a gravity system. So I had the septic system designer over and we discussed it. In the end, I chose a location near where the original owner planned to put his septic system. No additional perk test would be needed. The designer could draw up plans and prepare the application for me in less than a week. Once I had the plans in hand, I could get bids. By the time the plans were approved by the county, I’d have the crew on site to dig. There was a distinct possibility the septic system would be installed by month-end.

The “Necessary” Building

Outhouse
My stepdad would call this the “necessary building.”

During the week, I also arranged for a portable toilet to be delivered to the lot. That took just a single phone call; a man with a gray plastic building showed up two hours later.

The toilet building was really a necessity. First of all, some builders require one to be onsite. And even if they didn’t, I don’t want workers pissing all over my property.

(A side note here. There’s a house under construction down the road from where I’m currently living. As I drove down into town one day, I witnessed a worker urinating on the house near the front door. Seriously? How can anyone have so little respect for someone else’s property?)

I needed the toilet there, too. Even though my visits to the property are usually only a few hours long, it’s nice to be able to take a leak if I need to. And if I move my RV to the lot before the septic system is done, I’ll need the building to reduce the load on my RV’s tank until it can be dumped.

Those building, by the way, aren’t gross if they have limited use and are kept clean by someone who actually cares. That’ll be me. The hose is nearby; I don’t expect that building to get or stay very dirty very long.

And in case you’re wondering, it will be serviced — i.e., pumped out — once a week. So it shouldn’t get very gross at all.

Name and Address Sign

Sign Before
You can barely see the previous owner’s name sign behind all these weeds.

Sign After
Here’s my sign after pulling most (but not all) of the weeds. The sage bushes in the foreground went, too.

This week I also took care of putting a name and address number sign on the lot near the end of my driveway. The old sign, hand painted with the name “Young,” just wasn’t going to cut it. I wanted a nicer sign so I got a piece of scrap wood from the pile where I’m living, painted it with my landlord’s exterior house paint — a nice shade of sage green — and used spray paint with a stencil to add my last name and street number. The resulting sign looked pretty decent for something I cooked up myself.

I bought a t-post and a t-post driver and some screws with nuts and washers. I drilled holes in the wood (with my new drill), pounded the post into the ground, and ran the screws through the post to hang the sign.

Seeing the sign there made me very happy. It made my ownership of the lot more real to me. (It’ll also make it a lot easier for my wasband’s “investigator” to find the correct lot if he feels a need to “investigate” or take photos of my progress over the coming weeks and months.)

My War on Weeds

War on Weeds
I attacked the kochi a with a weed whacker, a pruning saw, and a hedge trimmer. The wilted plants here show the effect of the weed killer.

The final bit of work I did this week was to begin my war on weeds.

An invasive weed was growing in a few places along my driveway and en masse along my road frontage. The weed, which is called Kochia (Kochia scoria), reminded me a lot of tumbleweed (Russian Thistle), which had pretty much taken over our Howard Mesa property’s prime building area when we failed to get it under control. With shallow roots, the bushy plant grew as tall as me in some places. Each plant would yield thousands of seeds which, fortunately, would only remain viable for a year. If the plant could be removed before it went to seed for a year or two, it would be gone.

Pruning SawI was able to pull the smaller plants out by the root. The slightly larger ones could be cut back with my weed whacker. But the larger ones were a real pain. The best way to get rid of them was with a pruning saw. It was hot, back-breaking work. I spent about 2 hours a day for three days in a row working at it. On the fourth day, I attacked them with a hedge trimmer I’d rented from Home Depot.

And I was winning.

I managed to clear them completely out of my driveway and make a dent in the ones along the roadside. I should mention here that the road association — my property is on a private road — sprayed the weeds along the road. By that fourth day, I could see that the spraying was taking effect. The weeds were beginning to die. Maybe, if I was lucky, they’d be killed by the weed poison and I wouldn’t have to deal with them.

Then, that afternoon, I sprained my foot. Doing more weed control was out of the question, at least for a few weeks. And I have to admit that that’s the only good thing about having a sprained foot — it gives me an excuse not to deal with those damn weeds.

But I know I’ll face them again in the future. And I’ll win.

Up Next

More of the same…and then some. Stay tuned.

Jeeping in the Wenatchee National Forest

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Exploring my world.

One of the things I love about this area of Washington is the variety of landscape and terrain so close by. I’m surrounded by farmland, orchards, desert, rivers, steams, lakes, forests, and mountains. All of these things are within a 30 minute drive from my home — it just depends on which direction I drive.

Beehive Reservoir
Behive Reservoir isn’t anything special, but it’s a short drive away, up in the mountains south of Wenatchee.

The other day, I briefly explored the area around Beehive Reservoir. I’d driven up there with the goal of checking it out as a possible kayaking destination. The lake I found was small and rather uninteresting. Penny and I walked around its one-mile circumference before continuing up the road. We found a far more interesting web of forest roads that I ached to explore. But without a decent map, I wasn’t comfortable going very far. I decided to return better prepared to explore.

I had a 3-hour window of time on Monday. Penny and I, joined by a friend, climbed into the Jeep and headed out. This time, I had a Wenatchee/Leavenworth trail map with me that clearly identified all the forest roads. We drove up to Beehive Reservoir and kept going.

Our intended destination was Cashmere, on the other side of the mountains. A road numbered 7100 wound through the mountains and a canyon to Cashmere. I’d been on part of the road two years before, picking it up from Number 2 Canyon Road in Wenatchee. It was a relatively easy drive in the Jeep; I figured this would be the same.

But Road 7100 was closed to motor vehicle traffic. They were making improvements somewhere along the way.

Mountain View
I couldn’t ask for a better day — or better views.

So we followed Road 9712, which went west and then mostly south and east. It climbed pretty steadily into tall pine forest, often skirting the edge of a steep cliff. Every turn offered magnificent views. Although I tried to follow our progress on the map, using turns and trailheads as landmarks, I soon lost track of exactly where we were. That wasn’t a big deal — we could always get back because we didn’t make any turns.

We passed a family of three on mountain bikes: mom, dad, and a girl who couldn’t have been much older than about eight. A strap tied dad’s bike to the kid’s. I guess the logic there was that if the kid went over a cliff, her bike would be saved because it was tied to dad’s. The kid, of course, wasn’t tied to the bike so she’d be lost. Maybe that was the idea. We didn’t see them later on the way back, but their car was still there. Maybe they all went over a cliff. It was not the kind of road suitable for a family outing on bikes. I wonder, sometimes, whether people know how to use their brains.

It was after we made a turn down a steep hill that I got the idea to turn on tracking on my iPhone. I use an app called GPS Track that can keep a breadcrumb trail of where I’ve been. It can also display my position (and track) on a map — if I have a 3G or LTE connection. Since I wasn’t sure whether the road we’d turned down would offer other turns, I turned tracking on. Even if I couldn’t see where we were on a map — which I couldn’t — I’d still be able to follow the track back, even after making a bunch of turns.

At the top of the World
I used my phone to make a panoramic image; my friend used a phone to take a photo of me.

The road we were following descended steadily and then came to an abrupt end in a wide circle with a fire pit in the middle of it. A pickup truck was parked there, but there was no one in sight. We stopped the Jeep and got out to admire the view. We were at about 5,000 feet in elevation and the spot we were on offered a completely unobstructed view of the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains, still blanketed with snow. A variety of wildflowers grew in clumps along the edge of the cliff. It was beautiful and peaceful.

We got out of the Jeep to stretch our legs and take in the view. It was the kind of place that you find it hard to believe exists, a place you know you’re lucky to have stumbled into. I often find places like this when I go exploring in my Jeep. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I like doing it so much.

Panoramic View
Not a bad photo for a phone. (Click it to see a larger version.)

Burned Forest
There was lots of evidence of last year’s fires.

We turned around and headed back up to the main road, then turned onto it and continued on our way. The road wound through more forest, up more hills, and over more loose patches of volcanic rock. In some places, the forest was burned out from the previous year’s fires.

The well-maintained road gave way to a narrower, less maintained track. I decided it might be a good idea to figure out where I was. I stopped the Jeep right in the middle of the road — after all, there was no one around — and pulled out my map. I lamented to my friend that I wished I could find a good GPS app for my phone that enabled me to download detailed topo maps so I wouldn’t need a cell signal to use them.

Motorcycle Guidance
We ran into a pair of motorcyclists who helped us figure out where we were on my map and then recommended a great back road driving app.

I was rather absorbed in my map study when two motorcycles came into view in front of us. The riders were completely geared up and riding good bikes with camping gear fastened to them. I moved to the side to let them pass. They came up beside me and must have noticed I was looking at a map. They stopped and asked if we needed help.

I told them that we weren’t lost but we didn’t know exactly where we were. I know that sounds silly, but in my mind, “lost” means not knowing how to get where you need to go. I didn’t need to go anywhere in front of us and I knew how to get back, so I wasn’t lost. I just didn’t know exactly where I was. Makes sense, no?

One of the guys had a GPS and tried to point out on my map where he thought we were. I told them what I’d been telling my friend: that I wished I had an app that would download maps.

“Gaia GPS,” one of the guys said immediately. “It’s $20 but worth every penny.”

They went on their way. I had a good LTE connection, so I downloaded Gaia GPS on the spot. (I figured that guys outfitted like that had to know what they were talking about.) I used it for the rest of the drive and even saved a track from it for the trip back from our farthest point.

Flower along Road
This flower caught my eye as we drove past; I stopped, got out, and took a photo. It’s nice not being rushed by an impatient companion when you’re out for a drive in the forest.

We continued on our way. Soon, however, I was watching the clock. I had a doctor’s appointment at 3:45 and needed to be home by about 3:00 to drop off my friend and make the trip down to Wenatchee. Not sure how long it would take to get back, I set a deadline of about 1:30 to return. It was about 1:00. That gave us just another 30 minutes to explore.

The road continued to wind through the forest, often with sheer cliffs on one side or the other. When we got a good look out to the southeast, I realized that we were on the far side of Mission Ridge, almost at the same altitude. The valley we looked out over was hazy from the smoke of the Colockup Tarps fire, which had started two days before.

I was looking forward to a particularly steep drop-off alongside a section of the road up ahead — that’s what the topo lines showed on the map, anyway — when I realized it was past 1:30. We had to head back. I’d have to make another trip to continue exploring. I marked a waypoint in Gaia GPS so I’d know where I left off and turned around.

Flowers and Burned Trees
Less than a year after the fire that burned thousands of acres of this forest, flowers were blooming.

The trip back, of course, was much quicker. It always is. We stopped for a nature call and I got some mildly interesting photos of flowers blooming among the burned out trees in the area.

We were back at Beehive Reservoir before we knew it. And back on Squilchuck Road soon after that. In fact, we were back home well before 2:30. We could have stayed out longer after all.

It was a nice trip out — I say that all the time, probably because I enjoy exploring by Jeep so much. I’m looking forward to going out again, perhaps with a hearty picnic lunch, to follow that road to its end.