(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) - Hi, thanks for watching another episode of "My Wisconsin Backyard."

I'm Brian Ewig.

- And I'm Traci Neuman.

We begin season two with some new and exciting stories from around your community.

- Glider ready.

- [Traci] It's a sail plane, and in our next show will take you soaring and tell you what it takes to fly one.

- [Brian] Plus, we'll show you the traditional Hmong game of Tuj lub and introduce you to a 90 year old ballroom dancer.

- All right, let's get right to the show.

Brian, do you have that tape?

- Yeah, I got the tape.

It's right over here.

(keys rattling) (door opening) (light switch flicking) (suspenseful upbeat music) Tapes, why does it always have to be tapes?

(suspenseful upbeat music) Gotta find it somewhere.

Where is the tape.

(alarm bell ringing) All right, Traci, I got it.

I got the tape.

We can start the show now.

- Great, I was just looking for a dry place to set my phone.

- Huh?

- This is how ugly the stuff looks, but then they turn into something like that.

This was a dairy barn in Cross Plains, Wisconsin and these are oak barn beams that are 150 years old and it's gonna be a dining room table for a guy in Mukwonago.

(bright upbeat music) One night just looking on the internet, I saw a picture of this American flag made of barn wood, and I just like I just had to have it.

(bright upbeat music) And I thought, well it can't be that hard to make.

So I drove around the countryside looking for barns.

I needed a gray barn and a white barn and a red barn.

And I found those three colors.

(bright upbeat music) I don't have any training.

I didn't have any schooling on any of this.

I didn't have a mentor.

My friend taught me how to weld for a few hours once but after that, it's just like making mistakes.

And you, I guess you learn faster from the mistakes.

There's about a half a barn here.

Usually a barn is, you know, 10, 20 tons worth of material.

Yeah, and it takes about 350 hours to take one down, starting with the shingles and then the roofing boards and then the siding and the framing, and even the nails.

I save all the nails and put on a trailer.

I try to use every bit of it.

(bright upbeat music) The majority of what I do is barn wood.

For one, it's, this is Wisconsin, It's what we have.

And the stories behind this material is, are run pretty deep.

I've had people from like England and New Zealand call me and say, "Oh my gosh, that was my great uncle so-and-so's barn and I saw this on the internet."

(bright upbeat music) This is the original city of Madison flag.

I think I'm sharing history.

I think a lot of this material, well, I mean it would just go in a landfill if I wasn't using it.

(bright upbeat music) Then it's a whole nother thing when you can save the stories as well.

I picked up a bag of litter on a trip.

So, all the litter represents where the national parks are in lower 48.

If I can save more than a few other people then I can just like, it makes up for the people that maybe aren't recycling and I feel like I can impact a little more than the average household.

(bright upbeat music) I don't know what it's like to live in some other states that aren't that cool but our state's awesome and people love it.

(bright upbeat music) So, it's cool that I'm kind of just showing people what we already have.

Redoing it a different way.

(bright upbeat music) - This is a sport the Hmong people play back in Laos long time ago.

And then now we bring it to America.

It's a new sport called Tujlub.

- [Man] Okay.

- Back where we came from.

Our parents are, you know, like farmers and we don't have time to gather together like this.

So the only time we play this during new year time, you harvest and this is the only time that you have time to spend your time with your family, friends and relatives.

This is what get them together.

- You could do it every day after work.

It become a habit for everybody.

So this a lot different from where we coming from.

And then you would play from eight level from 10 feet to 70 feet.

- And all you do is just put the line like this.

Some people, they make it nice thing look like this but for me, I just go crazy with it.

And then when you throw, you just hold like this and just throw at the same time and just follow through in the top will go.

The game consists of stages.

So, the first stage, it consists of offense and defense.

The defense are the one who spin and the offense is the one who hit.

The offense trying to spin as hard as they can.

And the offense is the one who's trying to knock the top off and if I'm the offense and mine doesn't spin as long as a defense, I don't get a point.

In the second stage, It's not a defense offense.

And then the third stage and fourth and fifth, all you do, just that's why we have this flat, we cap it like this.

And the last one is the one that it has the highest score.

- I basically grew up playing this game and I created great friendships.

It's really like once you get to know it it's really fun and competitive.

Like the younger Hmong people, there's other sports like volleyball and soccer and football.

They all usually prefer that.

But like, I just want like the new generation to like see how people used to play with each other back in our country.

- It seems like the the game is dying out but what we're trying to teach these kids and get them motivated is to make sure to keep the the traditional alive.

- [Man] Whoa, get the other one, now.

- Back home.

It is like you, you hardly have a time to enjoy yourself with all the friends in the community.

You have to have a habit.

Otherwise, you cannot just stay at home after work.

Because this country, not just us, but everybody gotta have habit.

You gotta have something to do after work.

Go out there, have fun, enjoy yourself.

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) (indistinct chatter) (bright upbeat music) - Well, I married a dancer.

She'd been dancing since the age of three.

- [Announcer] Ladies and Gentlemen, we wanna welcome you to the first day of competition here.

- I had planned nothing for our 33rd wedding anniversary.

And so we went in for our first dance lesson on the 21st of December, which was our 33rd anniversary.

We stuck together for 63 years.

She gave me five kids and many, many dances.

She loved it and she loved everybody in the studio and they loved her.

If she was siting this close to you, she'd pinch you always full of mischief.

(soft upbeat music) - It was hard on all of us when, when mom passed but this gave him something to look forward to.

- The look.

(indistinct chat) The look.

- [Tom] I think it's probably the most important activity in his life right now.

- Nice.

He's not just student, he is inspiration for everybody.

Nice.

Age this is not reason to start to dance.

It's not a reason.

It's dance keep you young, keep you beautiful and keep great like Mr. B.

Nice.

Awesome.

He's a talent.

He's just one and only.

(soft upbeat music) - Well, the payoff for both Betty and me has been a series of memories which are awfully nice to carry along as you age along and adventures, friendships.

But finally that it has kept me able to be so independent- - [Announcer] Tom and Nastya.

- and it's nice to be able to entertain people.

And they remember that if you can do a job in some cases, just a matter of giving 'em a laugh.

You've left them with something that made them happier.

That's a winner.

- [Brian] So, what are, what is this here?

- This was a couple of years after Betty passed and I did when, "I Fall in Love" and the pictures in the background are my wife and everybody in the audience knew that and recognized her.

What a wonderful way to create a memory.

(audience applauding) So, that's gonna get into my bride.

(audience applauding) - [Traci] Is that one of your favorite dances?

- Yes, oh, I got all tingly when I was doing that, yeah.

Well, let's see.

Here's Nastya.

- I'm gonna,- - You want the sticks?

- Yes, let's do that.

It's fun.

- You make me feel so young.

- I know we have special number.

(both laughing) - [Brian] Let's see it.

- Okay.

Okay, Mr B, ready?

And one, two, three, four walk.

Ballroom dancing, keeping your mind very sharp.

Amazing for the, not just for the body but for brain as well.

Because once we dancing it's multiple stuff is going on in our head.

Because you needs to control not just your own body you needs to control your dance partner.

(bright upbeat music) - It's very surprising people don't think there's much athleticism, but even when you're dancing slowly you're using muscle against muscle in that slow motion to control it.

And this gives you more exercise than you might think.

(bright upbeat music) - I guess there some people could very easily just fall into inactivity.

I think that can lead to depression in older people.

And if you have something to look forward to and something to try and achieve, you avoid that.

(bright upbeat music) - She's watching in her own way.

(bright upbeat music) (audience applauding) (bright upbeat music) - [Traci] To see more of our short stories check us out on Facebook and Instagram or Milwaukee pbs.org.

(bright upbeat music) - Okay, a glider works just like a power plane only it trades altitude for energy.

And so the gravity provides your energy to give the lift in the wings that support the aircraft in the air.

And a short count for that radio check.

Thank you.

All right, so our guys are spotting for other traffic in the area.

The tow plane is going forward and taking the slack out.

clear.

Go, glider ready.

(plane engine roaring) All right, so at 6,000 feet, 5,000 feet above ground, I'm gonna check make sure there's no traffic around here and pull on that yellow knob and we'll turn right to tow plane go left.

Oh, straight up.

- [Brian] Pull the yellow knob?

- [Fred] Yep.

- [Brian] Alright, here we go.

- All right.

Good tow, thanks Ed.

It's absolutely the most relaxing and wonderful thing in the world.

I love the connection with weather, meteorology.

You know, weather controls our world and the idea of being able to go up here and literally use the energy from the sun to see a loft and not use any gasoline or electric power or, I mean once we use our tow, this is free.

It's like, it's like a sailboat.

So what I'm doing now is I'm taking us over the city.

The city usually gives off more heat.

The sun, there's blacktop, parking lots there's many of these factories and that warms up the air and that creates a lift.

So, if you have warm air at the bottom and cold air, it's gonna rise.

Just like you know, warm water goes to the top warm air goes to the top, see how the nose starts going up.

So now we turn into it.

Now if you look at that instrument on your right, that variometer, it's going down right now.

It's below zero.

- [Brian] Yeah.

So, when we come back around into the lift hopefully it will start gaining altitude.

Then we fly to the next thermal.

And you can do this for hours and hours.

So we're not, we just gained 200 feet.

We're looking for the traffic coming at us which I see none.

(plane engine roaring) (indistinct chat) (children shouting) (bright upbeat music) - This is year 16 of the Milwaukee River Lake Sturgeon Rehabilitation Program.

Here we go Mr. Sturgeon.

And the whole objective is to restore a population of Lake Sturgeon to their native waters in the Milwaukee River.

- Just as you have a child grow up and leave home this is what these fish are meant to do.

It's very rewarding to know that they've managed to make it through this growing up period and that they have a good chance of making it out there in the lake.

- The eggs are actually harvested from the Wolf River.

And then we bring them here to our rearing facility where they imprint on Milwaukee River water.

So, the water coming into this trailer is actually from our Milwaukee River.

And the idea is they imprint on that water so that when they're released into Lake Michigan they will eventually come back to the Milwaukee River.

- So, we usually start out with close to 2000 fish.

The DNR comes in, they do pit tags.

They're just like the little rice pieces that cats and dogs are gonna get.

And then when they come through the fish passageways there's a scanner in there and it'll automatically pick up their number, scan it and then we know what year that fish was put into the river where it came from.

- Lake sturgeon here were extricated from the Milwaukee River back around 1890.

And that happened to all the sturgeon in most of the rivers that lead into the Great Lakes.

And not just the Great Lakes, but worldwide.

There was this idea that there were no end of sturgeon and that you could just keep harvesting and they would always be there.

Well, eventually they hit the elastic limit of sturgeon and basically wiped the population out of the Milwaukee River.

So here in Wisconsin, we're lucky in that we're one of the 20 states that Sturgeon, Lake Sturgeon are found in.

And Wisconsin is the only state where they're not on the endangered or threatened species list.

They are on the watch list.

- [Casey] It's so important because the Lake Sturgeon are an absolutely magnificent creature.

They are the largest fish in the Great Lakes.

They are evolutionarily an ancient creature.

They can grow up to six feet long and live over a hundred years.

- The water can begin its journey and may you watch that journey over the years.

(crowd applauding) - Unfortunately, with their population being decimated for a long, long time, seeing a sturgeon in the Milwaukee River became an impossibility.

We're hoping to reverse that, erase that and get it back to the way that it should be.

(bright upbeat music) - I wanna name him Bob.

- Actually, this is the 16th year of the project.

It's a 25 year project because we won't know if the females will start coming back until they're 25 years old.

The big hope is that in fact we have, you know a viable population of lake surgeon.

You know, by the time we're done so that we increase the population of lake surgeon in the Great Lakes.

(bright upbeat music) - Well, oh, there you go, you got it.

(bright upbeat music) - The purpose of smoking is for them to kind of go into more of a defensive action and protect the hive and get back in there.

They are going to get out as much to attack.

They're more about protecting what's in there at that point.

So, think of it in the wild.

If there's a forest fire, they're gonna go and try to protect where they're at and not explore.

This is kind of mimicking that in a controlled setting.

For the top bar, we lay these bars across the top.

They're very loose.

What happens is then the honeybees create what's called propolis.

You can see a little bit of it here.

All of the cracks in here and create a solid structure underneath.

When we're coming into the hive we're looking at this to pop that propolis off so we can actually expose the the honeycomb and honey that the bees have created.

So, this is what they're building their wax off of on the top, you can see how it was dipped in wax.

And then from that they start to build their honeycomb down.

So, you can see the honey coming off of there.

- The bees actually have two stomachs.

They have their own digestive stomach but they also have a stomach where they take the nectar back and then they process it with inside their body and they put it in the wax and then it's fair amount of water in it.

And eventually they have to take the water.

They evaporate the water out.

When they get it to the consistency of honey, then they cap it.

And that's for preservation and it keeps 'em over the wintertime.

- So this is all of it's in the wax.

And then this appear is capped.

This is uncapped.

So they'll cap the honey when it's the moisture is completely gone from it.

So these down here there's still a moisture content on it a little bit.

These are, that would be your solid honey that you would really try to process.

Typically we would do it once a year, wanna make sure that they have enough to get themselves going.

We also don't want to take honey from the population that it's using to survive throughout the course of the, the spring, summertime.

We'll make sure we leave plenty of honey in here to not set off an alarm within the hive that they need to collect more.

(bright upbeat music) - And that's about three pounds or so.

When you uncap it, it allows you to save the wax and you use a centrifuge.

- [Woman] It's crazy.

And then you don't destroy the wax as much and the bees can fill it up the next time.

This would be the very first thing to do before we put it in the centrifuge.

In this centrifuge, we'll spin around and there'll be four frames in there.

The centrifugal force will spin the honey out.

We're gonna do half of one side then we're gonna flip 'em around and do the whole other side and then do the remainder.

As a family physician, I used to recommend honey a lot to people, except for the first year of life.

Bacteria cannot grow in honey.

So that's why it's kind of sterile.

Honey is actually used for medicinal purposes.

They can use it for SAVs.

(bright upbeat music) You could have two hives and one hive could go two miles, one direction.

The other hive decides to go a mile the other direction to get honey.

And with their communication skills, those hives will continue to go exactly to those same places.

So, you could have one type of honey from one hive right next to it.

The other hive has something totally different.

(bright upbeat music) - Thanks for watching another episode of "My Wisconsin backyard."

- To see more of our short stories, check us out on Facebook and Instagram or Milwaukee pbs.org.

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