I will be going to visit and work with a commercial beekeeper in about a month for hands-on working and training on how to successfully keep bees alive and manage them without any chemical or unnatural additions to the hives or bees. Part of my goal is to gain knowledge and confirmation that it can be done (this person does not experience colony collapse disorder with their honey bees), and I will be free to ask any question I want about beekeeping (I assume). Another part is to gain practical experience and learn through doing, and a third part is to learn through my experience whether or not I would ever want to try and become a commercial beekeeper take make a living (maybe after I retire from other work when I can no longer work as a teacher due to mandatory retirement age or some other reason). One of my life’s goals is to keep on working my entire life doing something, and maybe it will be as a beekeeper. I will want to find out what equipment I would need to be able to do it the most efficiently and cost effectively as well as all the work that is involved in it that I may not yet be aware of since I have up until now only practiced beekeeping as a hobby endeavor.
Having read about preparing for an upcoming season of beekeeping, and also comments by people who have had reactions to bee stings, I decided that I need to start right now to desensitize myself to stings in order to be prepared for my upcoming trip. Even though I hate pain and normally do whatever I can to avoid being stung, I understand that if I am not allergic to bee venom or hypersensitive (in which case I could go into anaphylaxis and die from a sting), I should be able to desensitize myself by receiving stings over a time period, and then my reactions to stings should be minimal. Having determined that and made my decision, yesterday I committed myself to intentionally take a sting.
Since my left elbow has been bothering me, I decided to intentionally get stung in the muscle right above my left elbow. After opening the hives and looking at the bees and checking on their progress, I closed them back up and then took a pair of tweezers and grabbed a bee from the front of the gentler give. It was frantically trying to escape and I could see it extending and retracting its stinger multiple times from its abdomen. I steeled myself and put it on my arm above the elbow to let it sting. As I released the bee, it flew away, leaving the sting apparatus embedded in my arm. I watched as the sting muscle undulated and pumped the toxin into my arm. I decided to take the full dose, so patiently waited until all the toxin was injected.
By the way, getting stung intentionally for medical purposes is known as apitherapy, and many people practice it and many patients pay to have it done. It is said that beekeepers don’t get arthritis or rheumatism because of the effect of bee stings, and many maladies have been treated by apitherapy. Historically it is said that King Charlemagne was cured of his gout by apitherapy in the 8th century.
The first reaction I had to the sting was a small raised welt on my arm, much like a mosquito bite. The pain was not so bad. It hurt somewhat, but not that badly. After some time had passed, the histamine reaction spread out into the surrounding skin with swelling and some redness, but the pain was still not bad. I thought to myself that this was not going to be bad at all, but by the end of the day, the muscle in my lower forearm became very swollen, tight and sensitive and the reaction had spread completely through my elbow and halfway to my wrist. As I rode my bicycle home from work, it was somewhat painful, but the pain was a rather dull ache–not a sharp pain except when the bicycle hit a bump. After sleeping for a night, it felt a little better, but then riding my bicycle to work again (it takes about an hour), the ache and tenderness has returned, so it feels about the same as it did yesterday evening.
My plan is to wait until my symptoms resolve themselves and then get stung again at least once a week (or more often if I recover faster) until I leave for my trip. I don’t want to arrive there and get stung while working with the bees and have it disable me so I can’t work. I also want to not be afraid of getting stung so if I do get stung I can just ignore it and keep working. My immediate goal is to desensitize myself to bee stings before leaving on my trip, and hopefully at the same time to take care of a few aches and pains I have been experiencing for the last couple of years.
This sounds so much like what your dad would have done. I’ll be interested in how the desensitizing all works out for you. Where is the beekeeper located that you are going to work with?
The beekeeper I will be working with is located about an hour and a half (by car) south of Tucson, Arizona in a mountainous area of the state. The name of the company is Arizona Rangeland Honey.