Can't publish or use time in my class constructor

edit

I am creating a class that subscribes to an Odometry message and in the corresponding callback function updates an OccupancyGrid message which is published to a topic. I've got all this working just fine. However, in the class constructor, where I initialize the OccupancyGrid, I would like to publish that OccupancyGrid even before the callback function ever gets called. This for some reason is not working. I also notice another problem, which I think is related. When I go to set the OccupancyGrid.info.map_load_time to ros::Time::now() in the class constructor the time is always zero. However, when I do the same thing for the OccupancyGrid.header.stamp in the callback function, everything works as expected (as does the publish).

I created a simplified program that exhibits the same problem where I subscribe to a std_msgs/Bool message and publish a std_msgs/Time message. Again, the publish and ros::Time::now() don't work in the constructor but do work in the callback function.

Here's the class declaration:

class PubTest {
 private:
  std_msgs::Time time_;
  void CB(const std_msgs::Bool& msg);
  ros::NodeHandle nh_;
  ros::Publisher pub_;
  ros::Subscriber sub_;

 public:
  PubTest();
  ~PubTest();
};

Here's the Constructor:

PubTest::PubTest() {
  // Set up the publisher and subsciber objects                                 
  pub_ = nh_.advertise<std_msgs::Time>("time",1);
  sub_ = nh_.subscribe("test",10,&PubTest::CB,this);
  // Test to see if this command works or returns zero                          
  ros::Time begin = ros::Time::now();
  ROS_INFO_STREAM("The time in the constructor is " << begin);
  // And test to see if publish works                                           
  time_.data = begin;
  pub_.publish(time_);
};

The callback function:

void PubTest::CB(const std_msgs::Bool& msg){
  // Test to see if this command works or returns zero                          
  ros::Time currTime = ros::Time::now();
  ROS_INFO_STREAM("The time in the callback function is " << currTime);
  // And test to see if publish works                                           
  time_.data = currTime;
  pub_.publish(time_);
}

And finally, main:

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  ros::init(argc, argv, "pubTest");
  PubTest pubTest;
  ROS_INFO_STREAM("The time in main after the constructor is " << ros::Time::now());
  ros::spin();
  return 0;
}

And the output:

[ INFO] [1438286118.670196332]: The time in the constructor is 0.000000000
[ INFO] [1438286118.670353480]: The time in main after the constructor is 0.000000000
[ INFO] [1438286119.440117003, 4853.700000000]: The time in the callback function is 4853.700000000

The results of running this program is that the publish in the constructor never happens and all the times that are printed to the screen with ROS_INFO_STREAM are zero (including the one that happens in main). However, whenever I publish a std_msgs/Bool to the topic "test", the correct ROS time is printed to the screen with ROS_INFO_STREAM and the publish function works correctly. Any idea what it is that I'm missing?

EDIT 1

I was previously running all of this with stage running in the background. When I shut down roscore and everything along with it and reran my pubTest node by itself the time all worked just fine and corresponded to wall time. However, the ... (more)