Bee meeting, our little graduate, Victoria

Yesterday was kind of a blah day. Too quiet at work. Equally quiet at home. The only thing that livened up the evening was our monthly bee keeping meeting. Mama took her lip balms and sold $25 worth of product before the meeting started. She was thrilled until we had to use that exact amount to pat our membership dues for the year. The meeting kicked off with mostly business – being the first meeting of the new year. But we quickly got to talking about catching swarms of bees. That was exciting. Mama and I are in a perfect area to catch swarms. We have actually seen swarms pass through the trees on our farm in the past. With all the open acreage around us, we are situated perfectly to set traps to attract Spring swarms. What is exciting is that each swarm equals a full hive. Not just a portion of a hive as Mama and I are buying for two hives this year. All we have to do is attract the swarm to a swarm box and then transfer the bees to a hive box. I will start building swarm traps this evening. Mama and I will set them out right after we get back from Honduras.

If they work as expected, we will be able to fill our extra two hives. I also have a top bar hive to fill. That’s exciting! Mama and I are planning to put a couple traps at Kenny and Kimberlyn’s place near Gainesville. That way we can start them in bees and we can swap locations of the swarm boxes relative to the hives we will keep the bees in so the bees are not trying to go to the location of the trap where they were caught and find nothing there. They are very smart creatures. I will have to start building hives soon. It is much cheaper than buying the prefab hives. Mama and I may end up with more than we anticipated when we started this quest. Tim will tell.

Maggie sent a picture of her little graduate. I have always thought we make way too much of progressing our children through the elementary grades. By the time a student gets to the actual meaningful graduation – from High School – it is a bit anticlimactic. Having graduated from Kindergarten or first grade – never considered that a milestone in a person’s life – and sixth or seventh grade, whichever it is now, to walk the stage for a diploma is not nearly as meaningful to the graduates as it used to be. Just another ceremony for mommies to get more pictures to put in a drawer. But on the purely cute side of things, it is a darling picture.

When Victoria was quite young – maybe eight or nine – she announced that she would not leave home until she was 32 years old. Whether that has become a self-fulfilling prophesy or not, it has become an actuality. She will reach that age with this month’s birthday. It is not that young men have not been interested in her; she has never been interested in any of her potential suitors. A couple of them would have been okay matches, but she was not ready. It would be not presumptuous to see that she has chosen very wisely in avoiding any romantic attachments to this point in her life. Now having waited, we will see what the Lord brings into her life.

That is one of the many things that Mama and I are looking to happen soon. Potentially this year. As our houses sell and we grow our business, as we pay off all our debts, as I explore new job opportunities, many things in our lives will change for the better. It will be a challenging year, should the Lord allow us to remain here, but this is shaping up to be year of dramatic change.

In our lives as well as in the world around us.