Happy May Day!

On May Day, the Holladay's have a tradition. Early in the morning, someone places flowers on the front porch, rings the doorbell and then goes and hides. This year, Lacey and Rob came out from Missouri with John David and placed him on the porch with the flowers, as a surprise for mom. Peter and I had the privilege of going out with them the night before, but we had to keep it a secret from mom until the next day. Isn't he a cutie!!!

Rob, Lacey and John David at Outback.

I love this one!

Here we all are. I wish we had the waitress clear the plates before she took the picture.

Sunday, we all got together at mom and pop's for dinner. Gregory is having fun, but I'm not so sure about John David. We all had a great time, got some family pictures taken too.

Work Day

We decided to turn our bee removal day into a work day. Since Peter was already on the roof, he decided to go ahead and remove some of the branches that were hanging over the house too. The fire martial always reminds us to keep the house clear, so that's what we did for the rest of the day.

Branches beside the front porch.

Peter on the roof cutting down branches.

Branches in front of the porch. Too bad I didn't get an after shot so you could see how much better it looks with all of them gone. ;)

Honey and branches. The side of the house looks much better now...trust me. We also did a lot of work in the back of the house, pulling weeds, etc. Peter had the weeder on the hill and cleared away most of the stuff there.
Whew!!! That wore us out!

Bee Gone! I Say!!!!!

The bee guy was gonna charge us an arm and a leg to remove the hive, so we decided to do it ourselves. Here is the place where the panel was that you could see the honeycomb behind. Peter took off that panel and started to remove the honey from there. He soon realized there was much more than we thought so he went up on the roof.

Peter attempted to scrape the honeycomb off the roof here, but decided he would have more success if he took off that part of the rood instead...so that's what he did.

WOW!!! Can you bee-lieve all that?!
I love how the honeycomb is lined up in rows like that. I had no idea it would look like that. I guess i don't know enough about bees and their hives. Towards the right, you can see where they built some new comb, but hadn't started to use it yet. This is such a beauty, and a wonder, that I almost hate to see it go. But we were warned that if we didn't remove it, we would get all kinds of critters looking to get at that honey.

This is the after shot...hive removed.

Can you believe all the bees here? WOW!

Here's what's left of the hive. But the bee guy said we needed to remove all the honey and the hive. The bees can smell the pheromones so bees from another hive may come and work on it here it we don't get rid of in all and seal up the holes.
Here's a piece of the new stuff that we kept for a souvenir.

Now that it's all piled up on the floor, it doesn't look so impressive. Kinda sad really.

Couple's Retreat

Here is the one and only picture we got from the couple's retreat. We had thought about going on the men's and women's retreats with our church, but when we heard they had one for couple's...

We left for Venture on Friday and came home on Sunday. Behind us there is the pier, and the restaurant is Eric Erickson's. On our way out on Sunday we went to the harbor to Andria's. This is a really good little fish and chips place...very popular. It's the type of place where you wait in line to order and they call out your number...I guess that sounds like fast food, but it didn't seem like that. It was very good.

We learned a lot at the retreat and had a blast. The speaker was pastor Philip DeCourcey, the former pastor of PBC. He talked about the roles we have as husband and wife, the importance of communication, and things to watch for that can break it down, and many other very helpful subjects. Peter and I were volunteered for a game called the shoe game. The couples sit back to back and swap a shoe so you each have one of your shoes and one of you spouses shoes in each hand. Then they ask questions and you have to guess how your spouse will respond. "who is the better driver" for example. You hold up the shoe of the person you think is the better driver and hope they agree. It was a blast! We actually got pretty far being newlyweds. We had a great time all weekend and met several new people. It was great to be back in church the following Sunday and see many of the couples we met at the retreat.

Bee Gone!

This may be a bit morbid, but we were glad to see that the bee spray was working. He did say to give it 5 days, so we will see how things are when we get back. We are going on a couple's retreat with our church this weekend. We are so looking forward to it.

Going... going... gone?

We had a guy come out on Monday and spray the bees. He said we need to give them about 5 days, and if there are still some bees here, he'll come back and spray again. Now we just need to get rid of the honey before it starts attracting other critters, and/or starts melting.

We didn't see this before, but if you look there under the ripples, where the bee is coming out, you can see the honeycomb. Pretty cool huh!? I love this shot!

He had to go inside the house too, to spray from our closet, to be sure he got them from both sides. He had to poke a hole in the ceiling with his screwdriver. I thought it was small enough, but pretty soon, a bee came in the house seeking to get away from the poison. Not to worry, though, he put a piece of scotch tape over it and we haven't had a problem.

Our Bee Problem

What's all that stuff in the tree. It's a bird! It's a plane! Nope, it's a whole bunch of bees!

I went to the lot to bring Molly in the house and there were tons of bee flying around. We have know for some time that we have bees living in the eves of the house, but now that it's getting warmer, it seems to be a much bigger problem than we realized. We went in the house for a few minutes and called an exterminator. When we went back out it was very strange. There were hardly any bees. We went around to the corner of the house, and then I saw them! They had landed...probably to take a little break, and so we ran in to get the camera. 1st thing everyone thinks of when there are thousands of little stinging insects near their house right?

Peter got the best pictures. The above is really from zoom. I was about to go inside and get the phone ready to call 911 if he got any closer. When we were putting up the lights at Christmas time, he told me he was allergic to bee stings when he was a kid, but not any more. He got stung a couple of times putting up the lights, and I had the phone ready, but never had to call 911. They were a problem then, but this was so much worse, so if he got them to come after him, we would have really been in trouble. My dad told me later that they were swarming around the queen and they can be really unpredictable like this. They could have turned on us at any time. I'm glad we went back in the house when we did. We may have stayed out a little longer, but I was getting paranoid about them all flying around. My mistake was telling Peter that. When I finally got the camera to take some pictures, he stuck his finger in my hair pretending to be a bee. Hahahaha, very funny. I don't think I screamed, but I'm sure I swatted, and that was it for me.

This is their hub, and the place that was a problem putting up the lights, as you may well imagine. The problem is they are not only in this one spot any more. They are spreading out, and we can see them coming in and out on each side of this too now.

The strangest thing of all is that when we left a couple hours later, they were gone. There wasn't a single bee on that tree, and they were flying around a bit more, but not nearly as much as before. Now we think they may have killed the queen. I guess they can do that when they all swarm around her.