Turkey-huntin' and Bee-hivin': Part 1

The alarm went off well before dawn on Saturday. It was the first day of wild turkey hunting season, and since we bought this place everyone from family to the DirectTV guy have asked and hinted for permission to hunt our land. We had already promised access to our friend Barlowe, who came up and walked the land with Jon last week looking for turkey scratchings and scouting for the perfect place to blast Tom. So Jon arose very early to don his camo and prepare to go sit in the woods and not say anything for 6 hours. I got the rare treat of stretching each one of my limbs into a quadrant of the bed and snuggling back down to sleep, until the dogs decided to jump up and cut the circulation off my legs by draping themselves over each knee. I finally got up and regained use of my limbs from the canine crushing crew in order to do morning chores and set up my beehives.
We had picked the bees up from Miller Bee Supply in Wilkesboro on Friday: 2 packages of bees weighing 3 pounds each. The queen for each hive was packaged in a smaller box with 3-4 attendants. I had also bought screened bottom boards for each hive to replace the solid boards that came with my hive packages. These screened boards are the latest in varroa mite management, and allows the mites to fall onto the ground below instead of reinfecting the bees, and without chemical that may breed resistance. So I had to hustle to paint the exterior of these new screens before I could assemble the hive. So after letting the chicks out and feeding them, grading the ground for the hives, and painting the boards, I literally sat. down. to. watch. paint. dry. Throughout the morning, I heard various turkey calls and gunshots echo up the ridge and across the various hollars (hollows) around our place, and wondered if any of those were from Jon’s piece bagging us a bird.
Now, growing up in the country, I have been around guns since before I was old enough to know what they are. Gunshots echoed through the woods all the time as I would play outside. Kids are handed their first gun here when they are strong enough to hold it, and it’s never a toy Red Ryder, but usually a little .22 varmint plinker, so you typically knew a shooter was someone who learned at their daddy’s knee how to use it and had common sense not to do anything stupid—in most cases. In contrast, hearing gunshots in San Francisco always gave me chills because you knew the intended target was not a 10-pointer! Here though, the opening day of deer season meant a 40% drop in school attendance that day, and on occasion, the hooky-player returning to school at 3 pm to show off the kill in their truck bed in the parking lot as school lets out! At my school, we were required to take Hunter Education as part of our 9th grade Health and PE class (a fact which tended to elicit surprise and/or stifled guffaws in California at my backwoods, banjo-picking roots), and after the daily pop quiz on how to build a duck blind or indentify animal scat, the lecture would inevitably dissolve into a storytelling session between the junior backwoodsmen and our teacher, a gruff, slightly inappropriate anger management-class-dropout with a twisted sense of humor and a fuse the size of my pinky toenail.
So I graded the land and stacked the hive parts that Jon and I had so painstakingly assembled with glue and nails on those cold winter evenings. I had found the perfect area to put them: close to our raised beds and front orchard, facing southeast in line with early sunlight to rouse them to start working before the nectar evaporates in the mid-morning, but with tree cover enough to offer them dappled sunlight in the mid-day. As I finished the assembly, the dogs started barking and howling toward the back portion of our land, and up strode Jon and Barlowe... To "bee" continued...