Pecan - Rockett Cafe & Club - Rockett, TX

This was another adventure with my good friend Bill, who lives down in Waxahachie. He apparently took his family to dinner at the Rockett Cafe & Club one evening and only remembers the huge pecan trees down in the lot across the street.

The diameter of these trees pushed my 36” chainsaw to the max - in some areas reaching about 40” in diameter.

As we continued to slab up what we could on site in order to load it on my trailer, we noticed that the inside of one of the trees was completely hollow and burned out. As we kept cutting cookies (circular slices) off of it, we finally hit an area with a honeycomb. As someone who swells up like a stuck pig when I’m stung, I was now regretting the adventure.

Fortunately, there were no bees. But the honeycombs spanned the entire cavity in the middle of the trunk - about 10” in diameter or so. They were still soft and moist.

Putting two and two together, we realized that whoever originally was dealing with this tree decided that the only way to clear out the hundreds, if not thousands, of bees that would have been occupying the entire trunk cavity was to burn them out. It proved effective and left a distinctive look that I have tried to keep in a number of pieces I’ve worked with from that tree.