We are growing

Baby started crawling last week!

Just in time for the new floor too.

Here are the pumpkins at 5 days and again at 9 days. I can't believe how fast they have taken off. We are going to start some more today and hopefully get them all in the ground soon.



Today I removed the little box the queen bee came in. She gets to eat her way out courtesy of a marshmallow I installed. If only it were like every time we moved. Welcome to the neighborhood! Now eat your way through the door.

The pictures are of the honey comb they built this past week. Too bad I had to remove it. It was in some valuable honey real estate.

And all these guys are still kicking around. I haven't killed any yet! All in due time.

There's so much life going on around here. It's great.

Hit the ground running

Baby and I are back from the lovely Alaska and enjoying a beautiful Tennessee Spring. Details of the trip will come in a later post with pictures when I get them all. For now I will placate you with a picture of the babe and one of my sisters in Alaska. I have so much to tell of the last week that it needs to be recorded before it's lost to the crevices of my memory forever.

The flight from Anchorage was the duration of Wednesday night. Here I need to shout to the world that we have The Best Baby Ever. She traveled like a champ. Better even. A silent champ that seems to do better on 6 hour flights than one hour Sacrament Meetings. What's up with that? Again I will detail that part of the trip later. I'm just pointing out that I did not sleep the night of said Wednesday. The next few days are kind of a whirl wind but here it goes.

• Thursday morning land in Nashville.
• House AC gets running as we are twenty minutes from the driveway. (Cutting it a little close guys. Especially since it was supposed to be done two weeks before.)
• Deal with AC guy for the first 30 minutes home.
• Come to terms with the destruction caused by the dog.
• Hop down to Rural King to get chicken supplies. (A little random I realize. But I needed to get there before all the good ones were gone.)
• Set up chicken brooder.
• Attend Missionary Correlation Meeting at 8 pm. Still haven't slept at this point. Pretty sure most of my comments were slurred.
• Baby still on Alaska time zone had a rough night. Which translates into we both had a rough night.
  
  


• Friday Morning hopped down to Rural King again and purchased ten Rhode Island Red chicks. We now have a wonderful chorus of chirps coming from the laundry room.
• Took the mutt for a swim. It was a glorious 85 degrees.
• Set three packets of pumpkin seeds on their happy little road of plenty.
• Prepared the living room for a life changing paint job.
• Finally showered. But still haven't unpacked as of the writing of this. How sad.
  

• Saturday slept in. Thank you Baby Dearest.
• Dropped baby off at a reputable day care and painted our ceiling with primer. We have a white ceiling! This is the first time our ceiling has been white since I moved in. Dave started the awful task of removing the popcorn ceiling (insert here malicious popcorn invented by the Devil himself) before I moved to Tennessee. Instead of aging sheet rock we have a gleaming white ceiling. It is a marvel to behold.
• Aired the fumes out while the dog and I completed a run to the dump. I have this fear that the truck will fail to start while I'm inside that odorously foul place. Who puts the dump inside a warehouse?
• Continued to air out the paint fumes while baby and I attended the Rivers and Spires Festival downtown with some great friends. Hopefully I can get some pictures of that to share soon.

Sunday. The typical Sunday. Everything but restful yet full of Sunday things, meetings, visits, lessons, the whole works.

• Monday. A package of bees showed up as I was pulling out of the drive way headed for yoga. It's awesome that we have a mailman that has handled bees, doesn't freak out at the mention of them with a can of Raid and delivers them to your door.
• Quickly sprayed the bees with water and left them in the laundry room too. Now I know you are expecting me to follow up with some disaster where the chickens eat the bees and all havoc has transcended my home into Pandora's box. But I'm happy to report that I came home an hour later to a content buzzing from the floor while the chicks were oblivious on top of the freezer. This is where they all stayed for many more hours. Unfortunately for the bees.
• Next baby went to her six month check up. She's 14lbs 9ozs of happy and laughs. She has the greatest laugh. Now that I have a camera I hope to get it on video for all of you to enjoy as well.
• Here is were I would love to say I went back to the disaster on the verge of exploding in my house. But, alas, Sully had to go the vet. On the way home he did a little exploding. In the car! He chose to puke in the car as we were pulling in the driveway at the house. Thanks dog.
• Hived the bees around 4pm. Oh how I wish I could report that had been uneventful. But I did something uber dumb. I left my hair in a pony tail. Doesn't seem like a big deal but, oh, the devil is in the details. I bent down to seal up the last of a long list of to-dos and eight of those girls got caught in my pony tail. Before extracting them all from my hair four of them got me. Three stings on the scalp and one on my jaw. My elephant man impression is super hot. This is the first time I have been stung by our own bees. Dave was stung once when he dropped a crowbar in a hive and then retrieved it with his bare arm. Hopefully we've learned our lesson. We have gear. We need to start using it instead of acting like, "I'm the bee whisperer, watch me fearlessly go into the lair of pain and suffering with just a loin cloth."

"No, Jim, I use a bad apiarist."

"I say we fill Michael's office with bees. My apiarist owes me a favor."
Thanks, Dwight Schrute. That was a highlight in our week. However, you may not extract our queen and place her on a flushable wipe. She's too valuable for such petty things.

Ah, Bees! We have had our bees for a little over a week. Check out how awesomely unaware and inexperienced we are at keeping them. We checked on them for the first time this Saturday and they haven't all flown off and ditched us yet.
In fact to our delight and surprise they had already started making honey! Apparently, they need to work their bee magic on it longer before it can be applied to toast. Thankfully, we knew this or we'd be having an unpleasant week of restroom familiarization.
Our little workers even started making their own comb. See the honey inside? The comb was so light and fragile. We stuck some in the freezer for show-n-tell for our friends. Thank you all for humoring us. You've been great. If we get a little too excited go ahead and tell us so. Then we'll proceed to tell you how awesome it to have bees and that everyone should jump on the band wagon. When they fly off into the setting sun shouting insults and we cry on your shoulder then you can proceed to tell us how awesome it is not having bees mess up your emotional stability.

It would appear that dogs like honey. As well as honey comb. Who knew? Yeah, probably not the best idea to get them addicted to it. At least we have this kick-butt pest control fence. The dogs are actually part of the pest control management. Hopefully this doesn't turn into a case of the fox guarding the hen house.
Instructions were relied on heavily from our trusty Beekeeping for Dummies during the installation process. We each hived a nuc and made Harrell modifications when needed. Good times!

Our bees did not arrive in the mail, as is the usual manner of delivery. We'll have to try it someday to see the reaction at the post office. Bet that delivery guy won't skip us for having a motorcycle parked within 10 ft. of the mailbox that day. Our lucky bees were picked up from the supplier in Alabama and drove overnight to arrive in our hands by 8:30 the next morning. See all those boxes of bees! We were last on the list. This guy had already stopped at three other towns before he got to us.

The Harrell's are bee owners! With a lot of first timers luck by next year we shall be official beekeepers.