Hello ,

We went beekeeping last week; the main aim was to harvest some honey. This week I would like to share a short yet, very important lesson we learned during beekeeping last year, but we find ourselves reminding ourselves of this truth every time we go beekeeping.

While wearing a full bee suite you feel, invincible! Picking up huge numbers of bees in your hands, feeling them buzz on your gloves and running around on your visor, you quickly start to become tame to the dangers the little ladies impose!

Last year around April we went to do some hive maintenance. The drone bees were being kicked out of the nest as winter was approaching and there were hordes of them in every hive. The excitement of seeing a drone and being able to collect one for my ever-growing insect collection allowed my tameness to become an error I was about to regret.

Filled with the excitement and some adrenaline of being able to collect one, I ran away as far as I could, because I had to open my bee suite and get the 2 vails that was in my pants pocket. This all went smoothly with no bees around and I successfully got the vails out and closed my bee suite in a rush. It was this rush, lack of attention and over excitement that made my invincibility become my entrapment!

Upon returning to the beehives, I successfully collected a Drone! All while a single bee found the gap left open in the zip that attaches the visor to the bee suite. It took me less than a fraction of a second to realize, that I am trapped with one very upset bee inside a bee suite. I was going to get stung and there was nothing I could do about it! Lucky for me it flew down my sleeve and stung me on the arm, but at least it wasn’t on my face!

Even though I ran away and ensured that all the gaps were properly closed before continuing I remained paranoid for the rest of the evening, thinking another bee has found a gap!

The moral of the story is this: Make sure there are no gaps in your bee suite because that is the only reason you are then invincible. As soon as a bee gets on the inside of your bee suite, your invincibility becomes helplessness in an instance.

The question now is: Are you sure your bee suite for life, has no gaps?

Weekly Top Shot: