1 Steve: I'm off to save the bees, Terry!
2 Terry: Well, at least those are relatively safe animals to work with. Assuming they're not Africanised honey bees.
3 Terry: Where are we going?
4 Steve: Africa!
4 Terry: Of course...

Phew! I don't think I've ever cut it so close with making a new strip just before publication time. My computer's hard drive suffered a failure on the Friday before last (9 days ago), and I have only just got it back up and running with a new hard drive and all my backed-up files restored, literally 30 minutes before this comic was due to be published. And my buffer had run out with strip 3408.

I had planned to make a large batch of new strips last weekend, which would have kept my buffer safely above a week's worth of strips at all times, but losing more than a week of production time took its toll. I took the photos for this strip over a week ago, and have had them sitting on my camera and unable to do anything with them until just now.

Back up your computers, people. The lost time is actually of minor consequence compared to losing your data. I'm happy to say that I lost no data at all in this hard drive failure. May all of your hardware failures be as benign.