A New Season Of Honey Flow

Jacob continues to build his bee business.  He put a lot of energy into building up his hives in both strength and number over the fall and winter to prepare for the honey flows this spring and summer.

Orange blossom was the first flow of the season.  He took his bees to Whisenant Farms in Parrish where he grew up.  Unfortunately, for unknown reasons, the swarming was bad this year.  He caught 68 swarms off of 208 hives and who knows how many more swarms there were that were never noticed.  This affects honey production, so he didn’t make as much as he had hoped, but he still did pretty well making 12 drums of orange blossom honey.

Next was gallberry.  He does this locally in Hague and Hampton.  With the bees more settled and the swarming behind him, the bees did pretty well with this making 22 drums.

He also had mating boxes at our house that made 2.5 drums of honey just off of whatever they could find around our place.

He had originally planned to take bees to North Georgia and North Carolina for the Sourwood flow, but several factors, including a hurricane that made landfall there, made him opt to skip it.  Maybe next year.

In the meantime he has all of his bees on Paynes Prairie making wildflower honey until the fall.

Overall, Jacob is pretty happy with how things are progressing with his up and coming business.  We look forward to next year!  (But there’s lots to be done before then!)

Preschool Graduate

Josiah has graduated from preschool!  And we couldn’t be more proud.  He has matured by leaps and bounds this year and has learned so much.

His school held a graduation program where the students demonstrated some of what they learned, then received their diplomas.  Granny and Papa came to watch and have lunch with us and Grandma came for a visit in the evening to celebrate our little man.

Josiah loved Ms. Merari!

The Birds And The Bees

The boys got a lesson in the birds and the bees this past spring.  Spring is the busy season for Jacob with his bees and he was working bees at home one day when he brought some bur comb (comb the bees made outside of the provided frames in the hive) to the back porch where the boys were playing.  He made sure that he removed all the female bees that do the stinging before bringing it up, then the boys got to see drones (males) emerging from the comb.  They do this by chewing their way out once they are mature.  They even got to hold the bees as they giggled about how it tickled when they crawled on them.  Of course we had to be sure to warn them not to try to catch just any bee as those girl bees can be feisty!  :)

Bees chewing the wax cap to get out of their cells.

She made it!

We also got to watch a mama bird build a nest on our porch, lay eggs, feed her babies, and them learn to fly off.  She initially built her nest in Josiah’s bike helmet in their wagon, but Jacob successfully moved it to a coffee canister.  Once the babies hatched, the boys, naturally, loved scaring mom away and seeing the babies gape their mouths open for food.  We were sad to see them go once they flew off to start life.  I intended to get a picture of the babies, but they just grew up so quickly that I missed it.

8 Months

Joshua has had another big month.  He’s very mobile now and is sleeping like a champ, causing Mommy and Daddy to stay on their toes in the day and to finally be able to rest up at night.  He loves to laugh at older kids and hearing his laugh makes my heart smile.

Doing laundry in Elijah’s shirt!

He started crawling in the week after turning 7 months old and has recently started pulling up.  He gets overly confident and lets go of what he’s holding onto.  Instead of bending at the waist or knees to fall, he falls over like a tree.  I feel like if he could talk he’d call, “timber!”.  He’s mobile enough that he’s officially been moved out of the “babies” room at church and has entered the world of “crawlers”.  I figured this would happen when he followed me out of the room one Sunday.

When you are mobile it means you can go wherever you want, including to use the table as a jungle gym!

While Joshua’s doing really great with his gross motor skills, his fine motor skills need some work.  When he eats, he grasps the food by the handfull, then drops it as he opens his mouth to shove it in.  It’s pretty entertaining to watch.  In my not-so-vast parenting experience babies tend to develop in leaps in bounds in one area while seeming to be stagnant or regress in others, then the area of growth changes, so likely he’ll progress in this area next.

Helping Mommy clean out closets and pack away the clothes he’s outgrown.

Joshua has finally decided that eating solids isn’t such a bad thing and he’s gone from refusing to open his mouth to crying for more.  He’s a bit spoiled because when it comes to eating table food he fusses until I put more in his mouth.  I guess if I dropped most of what I was trying to feed myself I’d prefer someone else feed me, too!

Feed me!

We are sleeping through the night!  And napping well!  After a visit to the doctor to be sure there was no physical reason for the night waking and when the older boys were visiting Granny and Papa and Jacob was working late, Mommy was mean and let Joshua cry it out just a little bit.  He’s a smart baby, though, and he quickly figured it out and started sleeping well.  Why, oh why, didn’t we do that long ago?

Everyone is just a bit happier now that I’m sleeping well.

Joshua is such a sweet little guy and he couldn’t be more loved.  We can’t believe he’s developing so quickly.  I feel like he’s gone from such tiny baby to an aspiring toddler overnight.  While it’s exciting to see glimpses of my favorite phase on the horizon, I’m clinging to the sweet little man that he still is.  Joshua is a wonderful boy that brings a smile to us all.

My boys in their blue stripes!  They are wonderful, aren't they?