On deaf ears

A day that began with bees and ended in a Birmingham curry-house (Goan xacuti - very flavourful), followed by a weary, satisfied drive home in the dark. The meal was in a large room filled with diners; it has many hard surfaces and few soft furnishings. I have hearing impairment, and struggled to make conversation

More inter-species communication. This message reads, loud-and-clear, "we need more space". The bees did not put this wax here, on top of the hive, I did. I scraped it from the top of the frames in each box after I had lifted and removed the one above. The bees, finding themselves short of space in which to put fresh nectar, chose to build comb in the spaces where normally they would not: between the bottom of the frames in one box and the top of the ones below

As I removed each box, this infilled comb was torn apart, exposing the runny nectar. Bees came scurrying up from below, attracted by the scent, to suck up the nectar and carry it down into the nest. I scraped off the sticky wax and nectar (and bees) and put it on the top of the board above the top box. Up here, the bees can access it, from the small holes in the board, in front of those blocks of Welsh larch. They will not attempt to repair the comb, but will retrieve the nectar and carry it down inside the hive

Tomorrow, I will do as instructed and give them more space. It's late in the year, but they have asked so charmingly. By then, they may well have re-filled some of the gaps I have just cleared, so there may be another cycle of scraping and cleaning, just in case I didn't hear clearly the first time