Each day I wake up and think: today will probably not be that interesting. I have already had more interesting, beautiful, surprising things happen than is normal. Today will just be average.

But no, today was pretty incredible too. After a nice breakfast with Doug, I stopped at the public library in Elmira, crossed the Pennsylvania border, and was enjoying a beautiful scenic ride down Route 328 when I saw a sign that was too intriguing to ignore: Draper's Super Bee Apiary, Inc.

So I made a beeline (haha) up a short hill toward the red barns that are the office, shop, and processing facilities. I poked my head in the office and asked the guy at the desk, who turned out to be Royal Draper himself, "Can I see the bees?" He took me over to a glass bee observations screen where you can see the activity inside the hive. Royal's grandfather got into the bee business when Royal was about 5 years old, kind of by accident, when he started selling beekeeping supplies to some of the local farmers and gardeners. Eventually they started selling honey and other bee products and that is their primary business today. They even supplied the White House with honey for 25 years!

I'm not sure if I got some sort of standardized tour or if my incessant questions combined with Royal's dizzying knowledge and passion about bees prompted us to wander around talking about bees for an hour, but either way I learned a lot. The following fascinating tidbits are just the tip of the iceberg—there was much more.

• Queen bees are created by putting laying an egg in a special queen-sized cell and feeding the larva nothing but royal jelly. When  queen dies, workers will create several new queens (as backup), but whichever queen hatches first goes around and stings the rest of the queens to kill them.
• A queen only mates once, and thereafter can lay and fertilize up to 3,000 eggs a day for the rest of her life. She can choose the gender of each egg—if she fertilizes it, it will become a female worker bee, if not it becomes a male drone.
• The drones have no function other than mating (if they're lucky). In the winter, when resoources become scarce, most of the drones are forced out of the hive.
• Beeswax is the second strongest material produced by an animal other than humans. The first is a spider's silk. One hexagonal cell can support up to 200 times its own weight without breaking.
• All cells are tipped upward at a 15 degree angle so they can store fluids. All cells are multipurpose—they house eggs, larva, honey, nectar, etc.
• A worker bee lives only about 6 weeks. The first three weeks of their life are spent working in the hive, after which they start going on flower runs. They can fly as much as 80 miles each day! Eventually their wings deteriorate due to all the flying until finally, they can no longer achieve lift and they die.
• Bees transport pollen my mixing it with nectar and putting it on two long stiff hairs on their hind legs. The pollen forms a ball, which they then scrape off their leg once they get back to the hive.
• Bees produce honey by siphoning nectar into a separate honey stomach (not their digestive organ) where enzymes turn it to honey. They then regurgitate it into a cell, allow some of the moisture to evaporate, then cap it with wax to store it once it is ready.
• Bees produce wax by eating honey and then sitting still so as not to burn it for energy. Enzymes in their stomach convert it to wax.

I could go on and on. But probably better you just visit the Draper Super Bee Apiary website and Royal's blog if you are interested in learning more.

Stocked up with honey straws for the journey, I set back out on Route 328 which lead me to the town of Tioga. I'd seen on the map that there was a camping area of some kind on Hammond Lake, a few more miles down the road. When I stopped at a convenience store for the day's supply of junk food, an old guy named Jim, also on a bike, confirmed that the campground was indeed about 4 more miles down, and, once he learned what I"m doing, said he was proud of me. I don't think I've ever had a total stranger be proud of me before! That was a nice feeling.

Well, I biked 4 miles down the road and saw what looked like a lovely campground indeed. . . clear on the OTHER side of the lake. Dang it! Checking the map confirmed that I was on the wrong side—either Jim had led me astray, or I'd messed up somehow. It was starting to get dark so I debated whether to ride several miles around to the other side of the lake, or continue on and hope for the best. Thankfully I chose the latter, and shortly saw a sign for the campground entrance. (Yes, it's still several miles to get to the actual campground—clearly it was not designed with bicycle travelers in mind.)

While I was certainly glad to have found a place to set up camp for the night, I was a little disappointed to see that this campground was essentially an RV village. In fact, I was the only person there who did NOT have an RV. Some of these things have wooden porches! How does that even work?

My only hope to escape the RVs was to find the elusive section of "rustic" campsites that did not have water or electricity hookups, which it turned out was yet another mile down a dusty dirt road that made me long for my mountain bike. But it was well worth the effort to discover that I was the ONLY person in all of Pine Camp. I set up my tent mere feet away from the edge of the lake, in what was quite possibly the nicest campsite I've ever had. And got in just in time to go for a swim and watch the sun set. Life is good!