If you hate to have a bee in your bonnet, may you never get many in your beekeeping jacket. To be honest, I have no idea what happened. At first, I thought they were stinging me through my gloves and then through my jacket, but when I spotted the one in my veil and felt another in my sleeve, I shed my jacket, ran around the yard a couple of times and ran in the house. They were still on the screen door when I left for work today.
OK. Let me take a step back. Saturday, I attended a VBA nuc-making workshop. Making a nuc, allows you to split a colony so that the following year it can be expanded to a full size colony. If all goes according to plan (and I have no winter losses), I’ll have four hives next year. Part of the deal with the workshop is that you get a broken down nuc box and two queens. Given that I have 2 queens in little queen cages on my kitchen counter, I wanted to get the whole thing assembled yesterday. So I assembled the box, stained it, installed foundation in the replacement frames, and then went to a potluck dinner. (OK, this might not have been the wisest move, but heck, it was Laura Rose’s graduation!)
When we got back around 8, I headed out to the beeyard, for what I thought would be quick work of moving the frames of brood and honey from my existing hives into the nuc box and replacing them with the new frames. Needless to say, I came in the house at 9:30 with countless bee stings and soaked because I couldn’t think of another way to try to get the bees off of me since the smoker was out (again!) and they wouldn’t brush off.
Lessons learned:
1) I should have bought the one-piece bee suit.
2) It’s a bad idea to check bees at dusk.
3) Bees really like me. (or are really threatened by me. I guess they know they I used to play rugby.)
4) Apis, a homeopathic bee sting remedy, seems to reduce the swelling.
5) It takes a lot of self-control–that I don’t have–to not scratch bee stings.
6) Even 2 dozen stings this season won’t keep me from my new hobby…
Postcards from a Northern Hive 
You are a glutton for punishment and those bees of yours seem to have a vendetta for you. Did you hose yourself off?? I would have loved to see that. At least they didn’t go in your back pocket 😉
Glutton indeed! I couldn’t get those suckers off of me. I went for a walk, I brushed them with my hands, I coerced and swore, and since the hose was so far away, I made some rain–I used the watering can!!