LiveOak

I will have to remember to take some pics next time I am out with the girls.

Hopefully your son will have some luck trapping out the bees. The problem with trap outs is that you almost NEVER get the queen and you still have the issue of honey comb and brood comb inside the wall of your house. The honey will attract ants once the bees are no longer there to defend it. The brood comb will rot and make and aweful smell. Provided your son's trapout efforts are successful, you will still have to remove the facia board and get the comb out and if you are lucky get the queen. When I get a call for bees like what you have, I use my bee vacuum to get the bees. I can vacuum the guard bees as they try to attack which allows me to remove the facia board without being overwhelmed by the bees. I also give them a real good puff of smoke to confuse them. Bees communicate chemically and the smoke jams that ability up and calms them. Once I open up where the hive is at I vacuum all the bees I can find and then work on removing the comb. Once all of the comb is removed, I let the home owner reinstall the facia board and remind them to calk it up good so bee cannot get in there again. Trust me on this, there ARE NO hard and fast rules on honey bees. About the time you "think" you have them figured out, they prove you wrong. If you can do the above, once you get the brood comb out provided it is fresh and has not been long without bees, you can cut the comb up into frame size pieces and rubber band them to the hive frames. You can install these in the hive. The nurse bees will make a queen out of the very youngest uncapped brood they can find. Once the queen cell hatches, spends about 5 days in the hive, and has been accepted by the bees, she will go on 5 or more mating flights and mate with as many drones as she can. Once she is fully mated, and no birds eat her while on her mating flight, she will return to her hive and take her place as queen and begin laying brood and running her hive. This is over simplified but for the sake of brevity, that is roughly how is works. If you get the beekeeping bug, it can become a rather expensive hobby or occupation. MUCH more so than playing with our Cummins diesel powered pickup trucks. Sorry for such a late reply to your post but I have not been on for a good while as I have been working my butt off in my apiary.

Wow! Where has the time gone? I have been working my behind off getting my bees ready for the nectar flow. I am running about 50 hives of various sizes and sorts currently. Earlier in the season I was chasing my tail finding hives that lost their queen and having to requeen them. I think I finally have them all queenright or with a frame of wet brood so they can make an emergency queen to hold them over until they can make a fully developed queen. I lost a total of 9 hives during the Fall to early Spring time frame, most due to Nosema and some due to varroa mites which apparently after to talking with a number of other beekeepers who had FAR worse losses is not too bad. I am currently fogging my bees with mixture of FGMO, 5% thymol, and about 2 ounces of food grade wintergreen essential oil. It is working but has it's limits. I plan to transition to vaporizing with oxalic acid in the near future. We are in the middle of a MONSTER nectar flow currently but if we don't get some rain in the next day or so, the nectar flow will stop as we have not had any rain for over 10 days now. I have also been planting .25 acre honey bee friendly wildflower, yellow, sweet clover, vitex negundo, vitex agnus castus, and evodia danieli fields in various location on our farm. I am staggering the planting in hopes of making the blooms last most if not the entire Summer into Fall. Right now we have several thousand acres of black berries in bloom, white ladino clover is coming on, and tulip poplar trees are blooming. I have hopes of a VERY good honey crop this season. After my experiences buying bees, this season was the final straw. I am going to start raising my own nucs and queens. Buying package bees has become so expensive that they cost nearly as much as a nucleus colony. I think I can raise my own bees MUCH MUCH cheaper and of MUCH better quality. I have purchase 40 complete nucleus colony hives for next season. I plan on trying to over Winter as many nucs as I can so I will have early nucleus colonies for sale until the drones are out in March. Then I can start stealing frames for brood, honey, and pollen to build my own nucs and let them make their own queens. Nice looking boxes of bee Hex! Best of luck this season.

By chance, do you have the Cummins Part # for that thermostat?

I am just hypothesizing here but if you have a P0217 and reduced engine performance, it sure does sound like the ECM/engine is still in Limp Mode. Do you have a code reader/analyzer that you can go in and reset/remove the P0217 code? I suspect at one time your engine was run under very extreme conditions which may have caused it to over heat and thus set of the P0217 DTC. Usually once a code setting condition is removed for approximately 5 successful starts (I am going by my crappy memory so someone please correct me if I am wrong) the code will be removed. In your case, it appears that for some reason it may not have been removed or this particular code may be required to be manually removed. Anyhow, just something I thought I would throw out there for consideration.

P0217 Decreased Engine Performance Due To Engine Overheating Condition P1693 DTC Detected In ECM Or PCM or commonly referred to as companion code Does the engine temperature gauge work? Or by chance did you misread the code P0216?

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention and I am sure you have already arrived at this conclusion..........just in case you have not or ever have second thoughts...........NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, loan your truck to ANYONE that you would not trust with your life. They are just too expensive and too much work to repair. Just my worth. The only other person who has driven my truck is my wife. She had to sit through and listen to my "block of instruction" BEFORE driving it.

I second Mike's inquiry. I would not be surprised if this IP is throwing a P0216 in addition to the already mentioned injectors and filters being fouled.

Well.......our "friends" at the BATFE have posted a "White Paper" on their consideration of banning so called armor piercing ammunition. In this case M855 & SS109 5.56 NATO using the irrational rationale that this ammunition can be used in pistols which may be over reachingly technically correct but a HUGE stretch as very few AR type pistols are sold as well claiming that it meets the technical definition of the law that describes armor piercing ammunition........which it ABSOLUTELY does NOT. Below are a few links that go into more details. http://www.guns.com/2015/02/16/atf-considers-5-56-green-tip-ammo-ban-calls-for-comments/ http://freebeacon.com/issues/atf-to-ban-popular-ammunition/ http://www.atf.gov/sites/default/files/assets/Library/Notices/atf_framework_for_determining_whether_certain_projectiles_are_primarily_intended_for_sporting_purposes.pdf Mind you, the progressive Marxists in Washington and the BATFE want to confuse and side track you with the "sporting purpose" nonsense........NONE of which is mentioned ANYWHERE in the United States Constitution or it's Bill of Rights.......more specifically the 2nd amendment. It may seem like and probably is a waste of time but if we do nothing, you pretty much understand what the end result will be so call, email, and write your congress critters to pass legislation to stop this and cut the BATFE budget by 50% or whatever amount you see fit. I personally think they should be abolished along with several other departments of government. If you think this is not already affecting you know.........I challenge ANYONE to post a link to a ammunition seller who has M855 or SS109 in stock or under 90 cents per round. I did manage to find some Carl Gustaf steel core penetrator for sale and supposed "on sale" but the price was not what I would call a great buy although in this current market it is a major score. Once ammunition like M855 or SS109 can be banned, it is just a minor expansion to ban a LOT more ammunition on the market. Of course you can rest assured, all banned ammunition will STILL be available to ALL government agencies to use on the public.

Yep, that was one of the side effects of that diet. I should have mentioned that.

You might try the link again, it works for me.

Maybe this has already been discussed and I missed it. This thread is getting long. Have you called Air Dog and asked them if they warrantied your AD150, would they allow you to pay an upgrade fee to upgrade to the Air Dog II 4G and upgrade your lifetime warranty to the AD II 4G? IF this new pump is what they claim and has fixed the problems.........the old saying may apply "in for a penny.......in for a pound". It may be worth it to work with Air Dog and see if they will upgrade your pump and warranty. Hopefully that will be the end of for a long time but nothing is guaranteed in this world anymore. Just a thought that occurred to me and figured I would throw it out there.

So how about a Cummins part # for the 200 degree thermostat? Does anyone have that information?

I put a Farm Boy Performance 5 inch turbo back straight pipe exhaust on my truck a number of years ago. I have been very satisfied with it. It helped solve an egt issue I was having due to some large after market injectors we installed. It is not real loud unless you get on it steady above 10 lbs. of boost. http://www.farmboysdiesel.com/product/budget-exhaust-fbd-5-straight-pipe-6/ Here is a link to when I had it installed. It came with clamps but I had it welded up and installed the right way so no problems later on. http://forum.tractorfarmandfamily.com/showthread.php?t=12825 As you can see, the spare tire just barely fits. It is a 285/75R-16. The down pipe from the turbo is not actually 5" the entire length since the outlet at (in my case) at the exhaust brake is smaller, but the pipe gradually tappers up to 5" and remains so to the end. Here is an example of how one sounds. I had this system installed 5 almost 6 years ago and it is still going strong.

This has worked well for me. I never thought I could go that long without eating meat, bread, eggs, milk, any oils, nuts of any kind, or cheese. I eventually will get to a point and weight that I am satisfied with and allow some treats in moderation. I initially started this NOT to lose weight, the weight loss was an unintended side benefit a had not counted on. I lost 30 lbs. but my chief interest was firstly to raise the nitrite levels in my blood stream and also to lowering LDL cholesterol along with my triglycerides as well as a reduction in cancer risk. You might give it a look, read the book and watch the video. http://www.amazon.com/Prevent-Reverse-Heart-Disease-Nutrition-Based/dp/1583333002 http://www.amazon.com/Forks-Over-Knives-Colin-Campbell/dp/B0053ZHZI2/ref=pd_sim_b_6?ie=UTF8&refRID=1V27A4XA5JAA00XPQ487 Yeah, yeah, they are selling a book and a dvd but in my opinion, both were WELL worth it. My cardiologist who is the Chief of Cardiology at the VA/Vanderbilt Medical Center was VERY pleased with the results. The last time I saw him, I got on the scale at 258 lbs. I am 6'2" and that is far too heavy. This time I was 228 lbs. What really impressed me was how the change in diet made me feel and how things that left me breathing hard or short of breath now became routine and normal to undertake. The diet is not for everyone but not too bad to stick with once you adjust to it.

Very similar to how I ran mine, only I installed a Vulcan brass hose line tap fitting before the OEM fuel filter and ran a 3/8" line up to a fuel isolator and then to the guage. I think the lines and fuel isolator provide enough of a buffer that no snubber or anything similar is needed.

Couldn't agree more. What pisses me off is that "we" (American petroleum companies I suppose to be more exact) have never used American food grains, meats, vegetables, and other farm products as a counter defensive to the outrageously high oil prices that up until recently were being charged by several nations who are BIG American agricultural product importers. I believe that American Agricultural export prices MUST be directly tied to ALL oil and other imports to balance out the deficit in trade. I am NOT advocating a government intervention in the market but private industry raising their prices proportionally to balance out the huge trade deficit in large part driven up until recently by oil imports. These nations CANNOT eat oil and a barrel of oil in my opinion is really worth about something in the range of about $35 a barrel. Any price charged above that in my opinion should be met with a proportional increase in the price of a bushel of grain or whatever agricultural product is being traded/sold. Granted, this is an over simplified example but I think you get the jist of it. In theory (which rarely works out) moderate prices for oil in exchange for moderately priced agricultural products would be a good thing for BOTH farms (cheaper fuel, oil, pesticides, herbicides, etc.) and petroleum exporters (get moderately priced agricultural products). Reality.......with the current situation in the markets.......DO NOT hold your breath waiting for the above to happen. I think higher agricultural prices driven by free market forces are FAR more preferable than the current mess we have now.

The diesel and gasoline has changed formulation over time for various reasons chief of which is to comply with EPA regulation. What has changed to the point of not even being remotely close to or even slightly related to any longer is the fiat currency which our "government" refers to as "money". There once was a time when our government did not print more money than they had platinum, gold, silver, copper, nickel, or other material of actual worth to back its value. The ONLY and closest denomination of money in circulation being used as money that actually IS money, is the American Nickel. Its face value is 5 cents and it is currently worth about 4.3 cents metal melt down value. http://www.coinflation.com/ It is scheduled to be abolished and replaced with a metallic formulation that is much cheaper to produce. This is one reason why Kyle Bass took delivery of 1 million dollars worth (20,000,000) of nickels. At the time nickels were worth almost 7 cents, but there was no down side since he paid face value. http://www.businessinsider.com/why-kyle-bass-hoard-nickels-2011-11 Hence what most refer to as "money" which is in reality fiat currency has lost so much value that the cost of literally everything has gone up to the current outrageous prices. For instance, about 200 years ago a gold 1 ounce coin would buy you a REALLY nice suit or many similarly priced items. Today, that very same gold ounce coin will STILL buy you a REALLY nice suit or similarly priced item. Take a look at what a Liberty Gold Double Eagle's value is. This is called intrinsic value. http://www.coinflation.com/gold_coin_values.html When you factor in that our "government" owes over $18,000,000,000,000 (18 trillion with a T dollars), and growing explosively by the hour, this further devalues the fiat currency. This is why "governments" who take on debt of a magnitude that is mathematically IMPOSSSIBLE to EVER repay resort to causing their fiat currency to become inflated so as to easy the repayment of the debt with inflated and nearly worthless fiat currency called dollars. When our "government borrows money of some intrinsic value and repays the debt with currency of less or near worthless intrinsic value..........I know what I call it. You will have to decide for yourself. Andy THAT is why we pay the prices we pay at the pump and pretty much everywhere else.

For those of us who are "acronymically challenged", could someone please spell out what CPP stands for?

I filled up at $2.68.9 a gallon yesterday. Could not believe my eyes at first.

Great minds think alike! I do this very thing plus I soak the battery lead terminals in a heavy solution of hot water and baking soda as well. The baking soda solution migrates up the battery cable and prevents the strands of copper in the cable from corroding. You would be amazed at the amount of acid contamination in the areas around the battery. You can hear the sizzle as soon as you pour the baking soda solution on it. Most batteries have the 2 piece caps that snap on 3 battery cells at a time and don't leak any baking soda solution into the battery. I do NOT rinse the baking soda solution off afterwards but allow it to dry in place so it can further protect the sheet metal as the battery out gases which is a normal process. Once the battery terminals are dry, I shoot them with a nice coat of spray battery terminal protector.

Speaking of head studs, if I am going to lay out the cash for some studs, 425's or 625's? I realize the price difference but I am thinking the extra clamping force would be a bit of insurance to prevent blowing a head gasket. Is the extra money for the 625's worth it?

On my 12th birthday, in 1969, I remember my father coming home with his brand new Chevy C-10, 307 2bbl., 3 on the tree, AM radio, and heater. If I remember correctly, I think he paid something like $1875 for it. He STILL has that truck. It is not in driveable condition but it could be.

I think that's the way to do it. Pay cash (Although you can't pay more than $9,999 without being reported to the DHS.) or check. It REALLY makes you sit up and take notice when you have to count out that much money or write a check that size. If you have the money and the right financial situation, yeah, go for it. You're NOT gonna take ANY of it with you when you leave this ball of dirt. I just hate to see folks get so deeply in debt and upside down in something especially like a vehicle which will lose so much value in the first few years.

Satisfaction is relative in that it means different things to different folks. If the buyer is satisfied with the purchase and the price, you can't argue with that. For myself, even at $40,000, that is just FAR too much. I paid just under $29,000 for my 2002 and thought I paid too much but that was about the best price I could find anywhere nationwide. They even gave me a fantastic trade in allowance for the POS Chevy Suburban on the deal. I just can't see how people can justify that much money for something that is more or less basic transportation. I can image the payments for most folks are pretty much in line with a house payment for an asset that is making NO income. Were I not on a large farm and other related operations, it would be difficult to justify the two 2nd gen. trucks I currently have but they are paid for, so they stay. I suppose I am probably out of touch with the current society and daily lives. I seem to be getting bad cases of sticker shock on a much frequent basis as of late. Although I was delighted when I filled up at $2.89 a gallon for diesel yesterday.