The first thing we did today was to go to Mark Tintjer’s house to learn about beekeeping. For someone who got his start in beekeeping by buying a book about it and then learning by trial and error, it was inspiring to see how much he knew about it and the significant scope of his operation. He let us watch as he moved each shelf from one of his hives into a bigger box because the number of bees was getting too large for the previous box. While doing this, he showed us that drone bees do not have stingers like worker bees, which is something that I never knew. He also pointed out the queen bee to us, which is longer than the rest of the bees and is the only one in the hive. At one point we even got to eat the larva of a drone bee, which tasted pretty disgusting but is apparently high in protein. After that, Mark took us into his house, which he built with his own hands, and explained how he extracted honey from the combs to sell. It was also very interesting to hear him and his wife talk about their general dislike for many conventional farming practices. Beyond many of the pesticides having negative affects on his bees, Mark and his wife also have an organic garden, and they explained how many of the plants in their garden are sometimes ruined by drifting pesticides from the conventional corn and soybean fields surrounding their house. Overall, Mark was a very fascinating and hardworking individual and I admired everything he was doing on his land.

After leaving Mark’s house, we went to go talk to Glen Hodnefield about both his no-till and strip-till practices, which are viewed by most of the surrounding corn and soybean farmers as unusual. The idea behind not tilling one’s fields is to reduce the erosion that occurs on many conventional corn and soybean fields. It also saves the farmer time and money because he/she does not have to go out in the fields to till them. Because Glen also has some highly erodible land (HEL), he is both required by the government and personally motivated to apply land conservation practices like his no-till and strip-till methods and other conservation practices like grass waterways and buffer strips. It was cool to see how a corn and soybean farmer was putting to use some of the practices that we learned about when talking with the Iowa Environmental Council.