Bee Hives Maketh the Man

'So how's it going?' I call from the living room where I am hiding with a book about beekeeping. The living room is a safe distance from my writing room, where hive building is occurring in earnest. I say 'safe' because flying nails are generally unable to negotiate corners.

'**"!!&% ($%^&) **^&"' says Andy. '**&$!!**'

'Good, good,' I say. I return to my bee keeping book. The writer is regaling a story of being left hanging from a tree branch by one hand whilst clinging on to a swarm in a box he'd collected just seconds before his ladder skidded away from 'neath him.

I read on for a few minutes. The occasional curse emits from my writing room. Periodically, Andy appears in the doorway of the living room looking red-faced and annoyed.

'Everything okay?' I say.
'Humph,' says Andy.
'Can I help at all?' I say.
'Harrumph,' says Andy. He flicks a bit of sweat from his brow and returns to the hive-in-progress.

Sometimes I am brave enought to enter hive building territory. Having been raised by a carpenter, I know only too well that it is unwise to come between a man and his work space, especially where wood is concerned. I think there is something in the sap that makes them go slightly mental. And NEVER offer advice. Offer tea. And cake. Nothing else.

Sometimes I am summoned to offer advice. Andy tells me the problem; he tells me what he thinks he ought to do. And I agree. This is the most tactful and reassuring form of advice to offer if you want to come out of the other side of the experience with your relationship intact.

Personally, I am very impressed that Andy has cracked on with the hive building with such gusto. When we arrived home, he said, 'I'm not going to build it today.' Which is okay. I think it's the correct form, when buying anything that needs constructing from series of parts, to leave the parts sitting in a heap for a week or so, in order that they may glower at you and intimidate you from the corner of the room, so any thought of simple construction goes clean out of the window and you end up convincing yourself you've got a major building problem on your hands.

But within a couple of hours construction is underway. And by the end of the day...

TA-DAH!! A beehive!!

Andy is convinced he has put it together completely wrong. I examine the hive. It looks like all the pictures in all the books we have amassed. It stays together. It doesn't wobble. If I was a bee, I'd live there. I might put up a few curtains and pictures and have a rug or two on the floor, but yes, I'd definitely live in Andy's new build, detached, attractive des res beehive.

And this morning, whilst I was scaring myself about how to examine the status of a queen cell in order to stop potential swarming, he built a brood frame!

It's all going very well.