This picture was taken Friday evening and it looked the same yesterday evening.  See that van back there.

  
This is the same one here! We ended up this evening with over 17" of snow!! It snowed all day, sometimes so hard that we couldn’t see 100 yards!  Stills at it too!  We canceled church since some of our members have to drive at almost two hours and those closer, still need to drive almost 30.  We called the neighbors and my folks up and invited them to have a service at our house and to share the day together!

What a blast!  It was so fun to just relax have fun today as an extended family of God’s children. 

We made a spring bunny, (the snow wouldn’t pack good enough to make a snowman, so we settled for whatever we could pack together in place.)  We ate lunch and supper together, had a snowball fight, played games, sat around with our guitars and sang for awhile.  It was just a very enjoyable day!!

It was wonderful to not have to worry about plowing, God will melt it in a day or so, or to worry about going anywhere, just can’t do it. (Dawson tried to make it around our loop of a driveway and it took him almost an hour, he got stuck twice and he had 4 wheel drive.)  Kinda reminded me a little bit of heaven.  There won’t be any worries there, the joy of the Lord is in our hearts, singing praises to our Redeemer, loving God, loving each other.  Makes me want to go there, Ya wanna join me?

The Lord blessed our hives in the fact that they were able to get up to full size very quickly and we were all excited about the upcoming nectar flow! Then we found out what “swarming” was! It seems that when the bees get really bored or are not finding enough of nectar, they will make a new queen and just before she hatches, about one-quarter to half the bees in the hive will all of a sudden take wing and leave the hive. I would try to explain this sight and sound to you, but it is incredible to watch and hard to accurately describe!

You have about 50 to 60 thousand bees all just streaming from the hive and flying up into a column about 20 feet across and 30 feet high. This make such a loud buzzing noise that you can hear it from a hundred feet away!. As the queen and her nurse bees move in one general direction, the whole mass moves with her until she lands on a branch somewhere and then they all land on the branch and by looping the hooks on the ends of their legs together, they make a mound of bees with all the ones at the bottom, hanging from all the bees on the branch.)

We wait until they have mostly clumped up on he branch and then if the branch is not too big or important, we gently cut it off and carry the bees back down to the ground. Of all the swarms this year, we have only had two that were way up in a tree, about thirty feet up a birch tree here in our yard. When we get down to the ground, we have a new hive sitting there on a big piece of cardboard with the top off. We then position the branch over the hive so that when we shake the bees off, most will go into the open hive and the rest out in front of it. Because the legs of the bees are hooked together, all have to do to get the bee’s off, is to gently give it a little quick drop, and the whole mass drops into the hive. But because they are bees, a bunch of the will immediately take flight again and you need to quickly get the cover back on. Then the next part is what really amazes me! They bees that are out in front of the cardboard, know almost instantly if the queen is in the hive. If she is, they position themselves facing towards the hive and fanning their wings to beat the band! The harmonics of these thousands of bees doing this, as well as the chemical smell they give off when they have a new home, attracts the rest of the bees and they will spend the next half hour to and hour, slowly taking their turns, walking into the new hive.

We currently have 18 hives and have missed three more swarms. It means that we will not get quite as much honey this fall, but if we have a good winter, we may be able to sell the extra hives next spring.

On a Garden note.
When we lived in Pa. We struggle so much with potato bugs! We tried all sorts of sprays and only found one that really seemed to work, M-1. However when we moved out here, the manufactures of the spray, quit making it and so we battled the bugs with our fingers and small cans of gasoline.

However! We heard a couple years ago that if you plant really aromatic marigolds between your potatoes’, you will have fewer potato bugs. They were right!! This is the second year in a row that we have had few if any bugs and they are the biggest and bushiest potato plants I have seen in a long time!! We planted a marigold plant every four or five potato plants. It has worked and we are so grateful that we have a remedy that does not include the use of harsh chemicals! Just an idea for those of you still fighting these little pests!!

If you are still looking for our other sites, Here is the link to Aimee’s current blog and my main one.

So please save this to your bookmarks, (at least if you want to continue to read my sporatic writings! because this is were my lowely scratchings will dwell from now on.

See ya around!

Argh!!  What to do!!!!  Now I know why all single people smile all the time!

We are so thankful that the weather is warmer and that summer seems just around the corner! Here in Minnesota, when the daily temp gets up into the sixties, like is has for the last few days, we realize that the winter is finally over, even if we did have snow just a week and a half ago!

This evening I was too tired to cut firewood so I decided to cut the grass in our pasture in preperation
for church campout next weekend. My four oldest children all wanted a ride with Papa. Since I will not take more than one at a time while mowing, this was going to entail a lot of switching.

So instead I hooked the wagon onto the back of the mower, made sure that the discharge was not going to hit them, and gave them all a ride. They loved it and Amiee did too as it gave her the opportunity to get some sewing done.

I Love these days!!!

On a business note, here is a picture of the machine I made for the sharpening of rotary cutter blades. It involves two spin jigs, and a cross slide table from a machinist supply cataloge, a Delta variable speed bench grinder, two Cratex wheels, and the two blade holders I manufactured on my dads lathe. It takes me about 5 minutes to sharpen a blade with nicks in it and a little less for one without. I havn’t had too much call for it yet and I have yet to see if I have beaten the Stauffer stigma of being able to design and build things, but never able to market them. We shall see.

We had a major answer to prayer lately! When Wayne was born the cost of a circumcision was almost $500. This time with Jaden, I called and asked what it would be and was told $175!!! I asked why and they told me that due to some change in the State run Health care system, I no longer had to pay for all the others who weren’t paying! When we got the bill, it was for $153! Praise God!

“Japheth, I never heard if your new little one is a little boy or a little girl?” (he had not seen us for two weeks since the previous week we had been home from church thinking we were going to have the baby.)

(Me) “Well, it would have to be one or the other I supposed, eh?”

“Yes Japheth, that is how it works! So… (about this time my wife, who he has not seen yet this morning, walks past us, still looking like she has imbibed too much on the watermelon patch. He looks down and sees her) OH….”

The poor fellow! He got red and started stammering around and if I hadn’t felt sorry for him, it would have been quite hilarious!

The new store is up and running and I have been busier than I thought possible! I have been getting at least 5-6 customers a day with some days as many as 15! Thanks to a dear brother who gave us the needed money to mail flyers to 930 sewers in the area, I have been getting quite a few machines in for servicing. I have been so blessed by the Lord and my close friends that I feel that this store is hardly mine, but God’s since he is the one who prompted all these hearts and so bountifully provided everything that was needed.

This picture is of the out side of the building where I have two offices inside. I currently lease about 180 square feet and am using every square inch of it!! However, the main business, Search Resources, may not be staying there much longer and then I would have first dibs on their space (almost 500 square feet) and the bigger sign you see out front. For the time though, I am very content with the space I have and am grateful to the Lord for His leading in getting me there. (see previous post for that saga)

No baby yet though we rechecked all our dates and figures and the EDD could be as late as April 6. So we still wait!!