the Ozark campground swimming hole along the Buffalo National River like many deep pools along the river is perfect for swimming floating or jumping off the bluffs [Music] getting to the Ozark campground swimmin hole is fairly easy if you're coming from Jasper head north on highway 7 for 2.8 miles and at the small Ozark campground sign turn left and go 1.4 miles to the campground and swimmin hall parking by the river [Music] any swimming hole where you have Bluffs in which you can climb up on and then use as a high dive makes it even more fun just make sure that the water is deep enough for diving [Music] it's just fun to jump off the cliffs and look at all the rocks there's a lot of arrows and cool rocks around here and it's just really fun because there's the rapids and all that kind of stuff and I like building stuff with the rocks that's that's one of my favorite things to do I like climbing around on the rocks and collecting rocks from the bottom that is fun and it's just so much fun I only come down here about once a year but what I do is just really fun and I love it beat the swimmin pool doesn't it yeah it does it definitely beats the swimming pool I go to swimming pools they're fun but nothing like this yeah it's just there's a but the woods and all that I like looking at the prints and everything he's just so much fun you've never thought about working for the Arkansas Parks and Tourism department yeah maybe that'd be fun cuz you know you can explore everything and explore it all the caves and all kinds of stuff there's so much to do here so much I haven't even done yeah it's just amazing [Music] Lillith my goodness you've been snorkeling over here and look what you got yeah you got a little little friend there mm-hmm can't scratch it it's amazing in which you can find snorkeling in the Buffalo huh yeah that is something else get started hissing at me oh yeah doesn't look like it you know might be too happy you're gonna let it go right yeah okay I just catch on for the fun of it okay I was hoping you weren't gonna get out to turtle soup yeah I know I never tried I don't plan on it okay yeah me where I'm used to catching turtles alive yeah cuz we go swimming sometimes usually find turtles and like to catch him and let him go after a while yeah well Animal Planet has their turtleman and and we have our turtle girl [Music] Lillith by the way plans on becoming a wildlife biologist someday we do believe she's well on her way [Music] if you do come here remember to bring a fishing pole because as you're cooling off you can be fishing for some smallmouth bass as well [Music] and before we leave the Ozark campground swimming home we have to show you a hard-working sand wasp relentlessly digging its way to China [Music] we're going to do a little bee exploration on this particular segment and of course I have my trusty B camp [Music] at about 2005 I watched a documentary on CCD which is short for colony collapse disorder and talked about how these bee keepers in Arizona we're losing not one not ten not a hundred but 10,000 beehives and I thought man that's that's crazy surely that's not so and I watched it and talked about the seriousness of how vital literally life vital that bees are to our crops and to our society and I mean that's really interesting and and I always remember that documentary that I watched and as time went on I moved to California in 2007 and I would see these bees and there you go this is and then land on me and I thought I'm not a flower that's weird and it would just kind of look disoriented and it was the bees were acting like the documentary we're describing them and that and that is the bees act disoriented and confused and they can't find their way home and so I said man this this CCD thing is real and I began to see more and more of these bees and they would land on me and they would just fall off and it's almost like they were drunk and disoriented I said this is a serious issue and so I began to learn more and more about honey and about that same time about 2008 2009 I was really into honey and honey cinnamon tea and I was going through the honey farm and we were buying orange honey and avocado honey and I was just loving honey and then I found a Bible verse in Proverbs it says proverbs 24 13 it says eat honey my son for it is good I thought oh man John says we're supposed to be eating honey this is I'm all-in I'm all-in so in 2011 after being away from my home and Arkansas for about ten years I called my mom and dad said mom dad I'm coming home and I'm ordering 10,000 bees to come with me and the rest has been bee hive honey heaven for Ben temple and what you're looking at you is brood cells and the ones that the honeycomb are capped those are bees that are in the larva stage and pretty soon little hatch into a honey bee takes about 21 days from the time an egg is laid to hatch out to be a honeybee been explained to us why honey bees have been declining colony collapse disorder is the as a disorder where a certain generation of bees will farm nectar and form the flowers and they'll bring that back and they'll feed their young their next generation and because of the toxins or chemicals or neo nicotine's that are in those chemicals it it hurts the the next generation of bees and so the next generation of bees grows up and it goes out but it's it's harmed and it can't find its way back and then over time the the bee populations get lower and lower and lower and they eventually decrease and then it makes them more susceptible to two attacks or two predators things of that nature and another big problem are the mites the vaillar mites all beekeepers dread these mites and they will they will attach to the bees kind of like a parasite and eventually the bee will die been confirmed the fact that bee stings really are good for you one of the reasons bee stings are good for you is when a bee stings you your body it triggers a reaction in your body to produce an adrenaline human compound called cortisol now I'm not an expert nor a doctor but I think this cortisol that's naturally produced within the body is very similar to when people go to the doctor and they get a cortisone shot or something to kind of loosen up their author itis it's it's similar to that effect and so your body say you get stung in your wrist right here says or your your knuckle maybe a better example if you had a tight knuckle or arthritis or something like that and you got stung on your knuckle the body says emergency emergency produced this special chemical and it sends it to that specific area and then as a side effect it kind of heals the area around that and so that's why if you ever talk to someone who's at arthritis or carpal tunnel or trigger finger and they've done beasting therapy they may or may not have seen some positive results from that so what makes raw honey so much better versus store-bought honey oh man you said the word right there but let's say it real clear so everybody can hear mr. Chuck said the word raw honey raw honey is the is the key word there raw honey is different than natural and it's different than pure and I need for everyone to understand that for people like myself and Temple house to stay in business raw honey is straight from the Beehive raw honey is me and you going out there sticking our hands in there like bears pulling it out and eating it now pure natural honey that you may buy in the store any store has been processed it's added water it's been heated it's been pasteurized and you lose a lot of important chemicals or enzymes you lose some of the pollen which it's really good for you you've ever heard by local honey it's good for you well that's because there's local pollen in there from the flowers that are affecting your allergies and when you buy a raw honey you get about two percent of that pollen and that's why it helps people with allergies and so when you're buying raw honey you're getting good quality fresh from the Beehive honeycomb honey and it just is well you can taste the difference in health and health wise it has many more benefits than than just regular store-bought honey and speaking of honey alright here's some honey chat now we're cooking can you see that oesn't out there oh yeah you see that yeah that's fresh Arkansas honey right there it's almost glistening in the Sun isn't it let me go over here and show Chuck this one now that is raw Arkansas honey at its finest why do you try this Chuck you're going just absolutely love it Han Ben was right all right well let's scrape some off here Ben all right look at that you go ahead and just hmm oh man there's no dinner you can't it's a world of difference world of difference and taste mmm and it's just it words can't describe it it's just heaven hmm not sure though if I'm ready to take it to the next level and start eating locusts like John the Baptist Oh mellow you know it's like a euphoria fossil evidence of this strange creature goes back 25 million years but now its existence is on the verge of being wiped out the Ozark hellbender salamander North America's largest amphibian it exists and only a few streams in southern Missouri and Northeast Arkansas one being the eleven-point River and Randolph County west of Pocahontas so just how did the name Ozark hellbender originate well it might go all the way back to the early settlers who after seeing the strange and slimy creature would comment that it looked like something from the underworld that was hell-bent on getting back in 2011 the US Fish and Wildlife Service put the Ozark hellbender on the endangered species list habitat loss and disease are the culprits to the dwindling numbers of these unique creatures these creatures are like barometers of our water quality in the past 30 years their populations have declined by about 80 percent that's telling us a lot about our water right now things that are happening upstream are coming downstream and a lot of it we don't see maybe a little bit of it here but the clearing of the land the trees and the sedimentation oh yeah it's coming into the water yeah the sedimentation the building of roads the pesticides the pollution even just people canoeing and you know turning over rocks fishing has some impact too on them but right now the what's really having an impact on hellbenders is the Kittredge fungus Kittridge fungus and rain of virus which is basically it's decimating all about 30% of amphibians worldwide and it's it's it's giving hellbenders the sort of leprosy their toes are falling off their losing digits if they've got bones sticking through their meat so you know they're they're just getting it bad on all fronts right now but this area here though it's kind of like their habitat the rocky kind of shoreline right yeah yeah they they like to nest under big flat rocks you can see these rocks or there's table e there shelfie and so the hellbenders get under there and they made the male guard its the nest sometimes up to 2,000 eggs and only like four to eight percent I think actually survived to become adults right now there's I mean at last count and this might have been over a decade ago there was 590 always Ark hellbenders in in the system the st. lous Sioux is breeding them they're adding a thousand to two thousand a year right now but again only like four percent of those are making it to adulthood so it's it's really who knows if these creatures are gonna make it so tell me about this book and the way you wrote it oh yeah well yeah usually I write nonfiction fish books and I was interested in the Ozark hellbender because Here I am living in Arkansas and they've got this person well this creature named hellbender and they're sort of monstrous looking you know and I just had to investigate this thing but I didn't really want to do it in fiction so I decided to write an epic poem the the first line came to me cleric hellbender and I just thought wow I got to go with that you know so I so I filled the book it's all full of folklore history politics science biology ecology interviews with authorities and much of my own views and opinions [Music] every species serves a function in our ecosystem and if one species is wiped out followed by maybe others then so goes the quality of those ecosystems [Music] you [Music] well we started out this episode with the swimming hole and so we figured we might as well close it out with another we're at the historic 1912 Silver Bridge on the mulberry River it resembles a storybook scene straight out of the pages of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn a scene that you might see in an old painting of America gone by there's just something to be said about an old steel bridge a river and the people who have been drawn to a setting like this from one generation to the next for well over a hundred years [Music] well this is a really great swimming hole on the big mulberry River it's it's one of the better ones around I think because it's easy to get to and this old bridge is really cool when I was a kid my grandpa brought me down here the first time in the early 70s and we come down here and go fishing back then the deck of the bridge was made out of wood and you drive over it on wooden treads and some of the boards were broken on the bridge and you can see the water down between it was kind of scary my grandma didn't like driving over the bridge she didn't like it at all it kind of made me nervous too but you know just being a kid like that but I guess they replaced the deck on it in the 80s and now it's got a metal deck with asphalt and it's got a lot of history too it's been nearly washed away a couple times since I just always enjoyed it you know there this is the last Silver Bridge in the area down here there used to be a couple other ones one in Rudy and one in mountain burg that people used to go to everybody say we're gonna go down to Silver Bridge and you'd say well which one so this is about the only one left now so Mulberry Silver Bridge is it that's kind of hoping they'd paint it again they used to keep it painted real bright silver all the time in the in the recent years they hadn't painted it so it's kind of looking looking weathered and looking it's aged I've been bringing my kids down here to go swim too so they've been coming their whole lives and my mom and all of our family's been down here since before I was born so everybody around here likes this place and it's a real good deep place you can jump in dive and got shallow area for the kids it's real popular got everything it's got everything [Music] lived here all my life near mulberry and I'll always cross the bridge you know a bunch of times and never thought too much of it as a kid just passing from one end to the other of it but now that I'm older and and I like to take photographs of things I started paying more attention to the bridge about probably five or six years ago and started coming down to take photographs of it and started looking into the bridge itself and realized that it had a lot of history with it along with the fact that it's one of the last few bridges in the state that's a three span like Silver Bridge here that's still in existence and so I started spending time here trying to take photographs of it and then get it from different seasons I've taken photos of it of night and during the day and just kind of started bringing my friends down here and a lot of them like Jay my friend that's here with me today he's always came here and we just enjoy the spot it's a real close to town you can be here within 5-10 minutes from Alma mulberry area and it's a it's a good spot to come it's pretty clean we've we've had to pick up a little bit of the trash that's left behind from others throughout the throughout the years but we're trying to stay on top of that a little bit more make it a little bit better place to come and things like that [Music] [Music] to me these bridges like this they just have a lot more character than a lot of the bridges that they're putting in nowadays and I'm afraid that you know because it's got a quite a bit of age on it the bridge was made built in 1912 so with that being said you know it's it's getting up there in its years and so I'm I hope that they can see fit to keep restoring it so it'll stay like it is and keep the scene as you see behind you [Music] so if you're ever around the mulberry area take some time just north of town to enjoy this area along the Silver Bridge and to view this episode again or any one of our others visit our website at aetn.org/exploringarkansas and don't forget to Like us on our Facebook fan page and we'll see you again the next time for another exciting adventure on exploring Arkansas