Overnight Success

I double-checked the time stamps of yesterday's picture, when I made a brief visit to add a box. Today we did a thorough, top-to-bottom inspection - looking for trouble, if you like; happily, without finding any. Instead we found this. Eighteen hours after putting this frame into the hive, with just a wafer of wax in the middle, embossed with a hexagonal pattern, they have turned it into this: hansomely drawn fresh white wax, with quite deep cells that a bee can bury her head and thorax in 

Even after all these years of watching them work everyday miracles, I'm taken aback that they could do this much work so quickly, not just to this frame but to several of the other new ones. If we trust the Met Office, the weather may finally look like summer for the next week or so. With luck, they can keep up this momentum and not only build the comb but put something in it. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, we still need the luck

We spent the rest of the day assembling a sofa bed. In addition to the Allen key provided, I discovered as we went along that we needed two 10mm spanners, a posi-drive screwdriver, a conventional screwdriver, a mallet, an electric drill, a bit to drill into metal and another for wood. Also quite a lot of physical effort and, at some points, two of us working together. It was also necessary to ignore the instructiona at several points, and ignore the fact that the nuts, bolts and screws provided were not the ones they said should be there 

I'm reasonably confident with this type of task; I can imagine that not everyone feels the same way and that the company spends quite a lot of time on customer support. Even having overcome the glitches, for several hours it kept us busy as bees