The First Bluebell.

Unlike my father, I am not a gifted carpenter, but I’ve just started making the second hive stand for the apiary. It will be sturdy enough to make it difficult, but not impossible, for me to carry unassisted; made from recycled timber from a now defunct garden emporium; and its dimensions and angles will only be approximately correct. Fortunately, the bees will not care about those details and will find it quite acceptable.
 
Lunch of homemade soup was had at “Saturday Open House,” the community café where there is always an exhibition set up; today it was a collection of the party manifestos in readiness for the forthcoming election. There were two missing; one party, I forget which, has been procrastinating and hasn’t published theirs yet, while some righteous but mindless individual has stolen the UKIP one (I wonder what they have against that nice Mr. Farage).
 
Then it was on to the apiary; I have two hives of different types there, a Smith – which I like, and a National – which I don’t. The intent was to rationalise by taking the bees out of the National and putting them into a Smith, that meant sawing the ends off each frame, with the bees still on it, so that it would fit the new hive; again, all measurements are approximate. There has been some discussion recently about bad tempered bees and I wasn’t too popular when I commented that cause of the bad temper is usually the attitude of the beekeeper. Today, I was able to complete the task in hand without much problem, so little problem that the smoker went out due to lack of use. I’m not sure whether that means they are a docile strain to tolerate my rather rough treatment, or that I managed to be very gentle with them in spite of the awkward procedure.
 
I managed to take a little time off to check on the state of Kilburn Wood (aka the Bluebell Wood) and found the first solitary bluebell flower beginning to show, apparently unconcerned about yesterday’s untimely snow.