It was a year that passed in relative peace, which let the growing army of Researchers endlessly toiling in laboratories all over Hive Supremo and several other sub-hives that began to specialize in research to finish the greatest projects of the last year.
The road toward it was a long one.
The easiest part was learning how to distill ethanol, but this was something every middle-aged redneck could do in his garage. My girls were much smarter than this, so it was a piece of cake to ferment some cellulose-rich tree leaves and wood and refine the resulting brew into ethanol.
It was much harder to create a combustion engine—especially with our level of manufacturing, which was, admittedly, not the best. Even the coal-powered conveyor belts, presses, and other working machines were pretty crude. Most production still depended on hand work…
Which we never had enough of, thankfully. We had enough workforce to compensate for almost every other shortcoming!
