Thor’s Fight with the Giants by Mårten Eskil Winge, 1872

Hehehe. I just came in from a walk through the bee yard, and I owe you an update — and possibly a search party for a hammer.

One of my hives lives off by itself, built up under a tree after I caught a swarm there this past spring. That hive grew so fast, so quickly, that moving it stopped being a simple weekend job and became a “someday” job instead. So it just… stayed. And grew some more.

The problem is what it’s sitting on. In a pinch, I’d set that swarm up on a bottom board I’d built for on-the-road captures — a thin sheet of lauan plywood screwed to a couple of spacers, with a 10-frame deep stacked on top. It was only ever meant to be temporary. It has now been the permanent foundation of a four-box hive for months, because I have known for a while that I needed to swap it out for a proper bottom board — some day.

Yeah. Some day never showed up.

But today, with a stretch of rain and general crappy weather finally behind us, I decided today was the day. Hehehe.

Now, the human mind is a curious, deeply persuasive thing, and mine knew better than to try dismantling a large, four-box hive on a damp day just to change a bottom board. So it did what minds do best: it negotiated. It swapped the real job for a smaller, more “reasonable” one — just slide an entrance reducer into place — and my mind convinced me this counted as real progress. The fact that it was still raining lightly somehow never came up in these negotiations.

Effort 1: I show up empty-handed except for the reducer. It’s too long. About five bees take immediate, personal offense and run me off.

Effort 2: I return properly dressed — suit and hive tool this time — and try again. The reducer jams sideways and won’t budge, even with the hive tool working it like a crowbar. Roughly twenty bees vote, unanimously, against reducers as a concept, and run me off a second time.

Effort 3: I come back in full gear — suit, gloves, hive tool, and now a hammer. Thirty-plus bees are waiting before I even get the reducer positioned. I set it and start tapping it home. Within seconds, fifty to seventy-five bees pour out to make their objection extremely clear. I set a new personal land-speed record finishing the install. Then, apparently under the impression this had become a biathlon, I set a second land-speed record sprinting back to the house.

Inside, I discover I’ve brought company: a dozen or so hardcore bees, still fully committed to the cause, riding along on my jeans, my suit, and my veil. I spend the next ten minutes evicting them, one at a time.

Final verdict: the reducer is in. The hive has been left to defend itself, as it clearly prefers. Lesson learned — they really didn’t need my help.

I do still wonder, though, where I dropped that hammer.