I was rather intrigued, so we ended up following Vajra— Meimei, Big D Rizzo, Yun Ren, Spooks and I were joined by Tigu, Yin, and Xiulan, who were likewise wondering what the commotion was about. The only thing any of us could do was watch as Vajra got the stampede of bears to calm down after they gathered a bunch of wood, and then set about holding a seminar on building hive boxes and proper bee care, all smiles, sweetness, and patience. She also obviously knew we were watching, but kept up the lesson anyway. It turned out Blaze Bear claws were dexterous enough to properly carve the wooden frames, and then also lift the frames from the boxes without making them bigger. The bears seemed to like how small and—once you knew what you were doing—relatively easy to build they were. Wood, some measurements, and a bit of wax to help show the bees where to build. It was one of those inventions that seemed so obvious in hindsight. Paobu was the first to complete his hive, assisted by the man called Baolin—and several other bears had some help too, squinting as the humans helped them measure and hammer things together. Basically all of them were people from the village Shady Glade, who now had something of a friendship with the bears. They took Vajra’s bombast and new form relatively in stride—getting attacked by giant hornets and fighting alongside bears against them seemed to have pushed up their tolerance for weirdness… and Vajra was teaching them a new and useful skill. As soon as he was done… he was rewarded. The entire clearing jerked to attention as they heard the buzzing of wings—and then relaxed when they saw what was making the noise. A small swarm (...)