IKEA furniture for bees!

What does a beekeeper do in the winter - well, in a place where cold, nasty winter exists? She prepares for spring, of course. And one of the many spring preparation tasks a beekeeper can take on is building frames to replace broken and unusable ones and to allow expansion of the number of existing hives. And for me, the beginning of 2010 marked open season for building frames - 2,700 of them.

Does one need any previous knowledge or experience to engage in a task like this? Well, a view of the big picture helps, as 2,700 frames is plenty of work given the steps involved in producing a ready-to-go frame. Also, experience putting together a piece or two of the infamous IKEA furniture is a bonus, at least for the initial hammer and nail assembly part of frame-building. You see, if you buy pre-cut frame pieces, you'll find yourself in an IKEAesque dreamworld of cheap wood product that splits before the nail even makes contact with its surface and a puzzling end product where 90 degree angles are not allowed to come in pairs. Luckily, unlike with a IKEA chest of drawers, my frames will fit into the bee box despite trapezoidal tendencies.

One thing I've noticed in the process here is the usage of fine motor skills and small muscle strength - that of the hands, wrists and forearms. One of the steps in frame-building is stringing thin wire back and forth across the length of the frames. Extensive use of pliers is needed to manipulate the wire and keep it taut. Even with careful attention to muscle usage and regular break-taking, I'm finding a great deal of aggravation of my existing repetitive strain injury. I'm trying to work on some techniques that will minimize the strain on my hands. Another chapter in the efficiency/long-term physical health balance.