Remember my post “Sausage Situation”, where I selfishly refused to give up the last Wishek Sausage? Something funny happened after that!  A  church member brought me a heavy gift bag. First item: a homemade kugen, another tradition I will write about later. Then, two packages of Wishek Sausage!!! Ha-ha-ha, you read my blog, I said! We talked about the sausage situation some and laughed. There is one more thing in the bag, she told me. So I looked again and found a container of Wishek honey. The last line of the Sausage Situation post was something like you get more sausage with honey.  Funny and most thoughtful gifts! I smiled all day.

Yes, Wishek has amazing honey, too. Danzing Honey contracts with farmers to place company hives on farmer’s land. In return, the farmers have bees around to pollinate crops and then they receive a certain amount (cases?) of processed honey. Of course, the honey is packed in plastic bear bottles. In the fall, Danzig brings the hives (boxes) into town to process the honey. Don the Baptist lives a few blocks away and this fall when we walked from his house, we passed right by the buzzing bee stacks. I veered to the right, but Don just strolled along down the street center. Bees? No problem! We watched then, as workers loaded the bee boxes onto trucks and drove off to Texas for the winter. Bees can make honey all year if they have flowers, so they do their thing down south before coming back here for the warm season (like some people I know).

This summer I camped along the edge of a farmer’s field, right near a stack of bee boxes just like these.

Life in North Dakota is a never-ending source of interesting adventures. And, even though many people call themselves stuffy, strict, Germans from Russia, they are some of the nicest and funniest people I ever met.