As with many endeavors, there are times when beekeeping is hard. I don’t like to talk about those times much because so many people have a negative association with bees. When you tell people that you have bees, you can get a lot of negative reactions. “Do you get stung all the time?” “Can you even use your backyard?” “It doesn’t sound safe.” “How do you have the time?” No. Usually. It is. It doesn’t take that much time.
Genuinely, I love keeping bees. I’m constantly learning, I’m contributing something back to the environment, and the honey ain’t bad. But there are difficult days. Days you lose a hive. Days you have to clean out a wax moth infestation. Days your wife gets stung.
And days you get stung. Today was one of those days.
Why/How I Got Stung
When I get stung, which is honestly pretty rare, it’s usually my fault. I’m very fallible and I make mistakes.
First mistake, I only wore a t-shirt under my bee jacket. Usually I wear long sleeves, but it’s so hot. I thought, “it can’t hurt to only have one layer if that layer is a bee jacket.” Wrong.
Second mistake, it was a bad time to open the hive. It’s now July, which is when the bees are more defensive. The nectar flow has mostly ended and the bees have honey to protect from others. Also, it’s supposed to rain for 4 days straight, starting in a few hours. Bees know when the rain is coming and they don’t want their house open when it rains.
I did need to do a quick check after taking a few deep frames of honey out a few weeks ago and harvesting and because I had a totally empty, foundation-less super on top and wanted to see if they had done anything with it. But I didn’t think about the timing.
I should have just done a quick peek. Instead, I got excited about how good it looked inside and tried to do too much. The hive was open too long. The bees got agitated. I was working in a cloud of frustrated bees. The pictures below show how many little stingers were on my suit afterward.
And because I was wearing a t-shirt, a few got through and I have three stings on my arm, one on my wrist, and one on my stomach.
It sucks when this happens. It hurts, and it’s a little scary. Once I realized how disturbed the hive was, I quickly abandoned my attempt to pull honey frames, threw a second empty honey super on top, and closed up the hive. Usually when I walk away from the hive, all the bees get off me pretty quickly. But they were especially agitated today, so I had to walk around the house to the front porch in my bee suit and run the porch fan to get them off.
Why I Continue to Keep Bees (Even When It’s Hard)
At this point, I sound like a crazy person. Why would I keep these things in my backyard? Why would I have a hobby where I can get hurt?
Immediately following a bad inspection like this one, I ask myself these questions. But I always decide to keep going because I truly get so much enjoyment from them and they continue to be great teachers.
On the enjoyment front, I got my first batch of honey a few weeks ago! I want to do a whole post on the process, so I’ll save the details. But it was very cool. And when I got into the hive today, they had built out comb and mostly filled the 3 deep and 10 shallow frames I added just a few weeks ago. These bees are really doing great. No wonder they are defensive, they have a lot of valuable stuff to protect.
I’m also always learning with the bees. Every mistake has brought new lessons. And the bees are complex; learning how they operate has really been fascinating.
Mostly, the bees teach me patience. My nature is impatient. I want instant gratification. I want to get things done and accomplished as quickly as possible. I hate waiting. But the bees don’t care. They operate on bee time.
Today, I should have been patient. I should have remembered it’s a bad time of year to have them open. When I saw a full super (box for collecting honey), I should have thought, “Wow, this is great. Let me give them another super so they have room to grow, and I’ll come back and harvest all of this at a better time.” I could have been in and out without incident.
There are about 50 other times I should have been more patient with the bees. And I’ve learned each time. Bees are full of life lessons, and they’re the best little teachers I could ask for.