Fun Napkin Folding -- Make your brunch or dinner party really special!

Poor Bees

St. Gobnait, patron of beekeepers,
Pray for us!

Winter is setting in with a vengeance the next few weeks. Tonight the temps are expected to drop to single digits and for the next few weeks we will mostly see highs only in the 30s. That means the bees are clustered and can't break out to eat or fly. (Even bees need to go potty.)

 The temps aren't the only things impacting the bees. It's supposed to be grey and mostly cloudy in coming days. That means no sun warming up the hives internally. So they will be clustered and if the food is too far away they can literally starve to death.

These are the days I turn to all the patron saints of bee keepers and those who kept bees. St. Ambrose and St. Valentine are patrons, but there are others. St. Isidore the Farmer probably knew the value of bees for pollination and maybe even kept some.

Need Ideas for Decorating this Christmas?

It's beginning to look like Christmas at Camp Kreitzer

The holidays are upon us and I decided this year I wanted to promote even more the message to keep Christ in Christmas. So I ordered a nativity from a U.S. firm and it's now up and lit for nighttime viewing. It's true we don't get hundreds of cars going down our road, but those that do will see the Holy Family nestled in our yard. I hope to expand the scene in the years ahead. This will likely be the first decoration that goes up every year and will be left up throughout the ENTIRE Christmas season. Come see it and stop in for an old fashioned tea party!

Teaching Survival Swimming to LIttle Ones

It's that time of years when little children fall into swimming pools. We have a Kreitzer family tradition. Aunt Alice teaches the little ones "under-bubbles-kick," a survival swimming method. Little ones, even tiny ones, learn to swim to the wall and pull themselves out. They are discouraged from swimming to a person. If the baby turns back, he's redirected toward the wall. This method is no replacement for vigilance, but it adds extra security and the sooner children are made water safe, the better.

A big thank you to our daughter Alice for helping one of the youngest of the grandchildren be safer in the water. Good job, Charlie!

Music for Walking

I like to Walk with Leslie, but listening to her can get pretty boring, especially when I do the same routines over and over so I thought, why not put up some of my favorite music and do my own routine using her four basic steps (walk in place, side steps, kick, and knee lifts with a few variations like side step/knee lift combinations). So here's my routine with warm up music followed by fast music, followed by cool down.

Warmup: Play Once

March 16th: Feeding the Bees

March is the starving month for bees. There's no nectar yet and the queen is laying the Spring brood so the need for food is up. We fed our five active hives sugar syrup on Friday, March 16 when it got above 50 degrees. Since then it's been pretty cold so we are waiting for a 60+ degree, calm, sunny day to do a full inspection.

We also took down the hive that collapsed last fall. It had two boxes of capped and uncapped honey, 18 frames which we'll use to feed the bees when we split hives in April.

When I took the frames out of the bottom box I found the small cluster of bees who remained in the hive and couldn't survive the winter. They were huddled in a corner. There was plenty of food in the hive, but there weren't enough bees to keep warm. I showed the bees to the grandchildren and we all agreed it was sad.

They are wonderful little creatures of God. Isn't it tragic that in our crazy culture people are more likely to lament the loss of this little cluster of a few hundred bees than the 1500 babies ripped apart every day in surgical abortions?

We live in sad times. All you saints and angels, pray for our return to sanity!