To Bee, or not to Bee...that is the Question

Getting stung by a bee may have unexpected (positive) consequences

“For so work the honey-bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.”

— William Shakespeare

Let me start right out with this very clear message: this is NOT medical advice, in any way shape or form. What this is, however, is personal (and remarkable!) observation about bee stings. I have friends for whom a single bee sting could be fatal, so yes…I know. Don’t flood my comments with worried warnings.

A few months ago, a good friend (“D.B.”) wanted to start a bee colony at her ranch to harvest local honey. I had interest in this as well; I consume honey every day for its beneficial properties.

A bunch of us (D.B., her three grown kids, me, and my fiancée Emily) went to a few-hour class given by a local bee expert a few hours north of home.

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By the way: I like to listen to music as I write, so if you want to get the fullest experience, put this song on repeat while you read so that you can hear what I heard as I composed this piece for you. It’s beautiful music.

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We brought along grapes and crackers for snacks while we took the class, took copious notes, and D.B. went ahead and ordered the components for three hives. I bought a few quart jars of honey from the beekeeper at the end of the class, because his honey was high quality.

One modern approach to bee keeping uses a stack of modular boxes, some called “deeps”, and some shallower ones called “supers”.

Each has a number of removable “frames” inside with hexagonal wax or plastic “starter grids” that help the bees form their hive material.

The deeper boxes are stacked at the bottom and are the layers where the queen likes to do her queenly thing and lay eggs. The shallower boxes up top (which D.B. added to the hives earlier this month) are then used by the bees for “food storage” so the comb in that part of the stack primarily contains honey.

We built a pad in a glen near D.B.’s barn (which we’ll use to expand the hives over time), and over a few weeks we painted and installed three hives.

Although some detractors tried to tell us that the pad design we used would be bad for the bees, it turned out to work very well and all three hives are thriving and buzzing. The number of bees inside each nearly doubled or tripled and they are quite healthy.

Last week, D.B. decided it was time to try a honey harvest. So, we aimed to take apart the top two boxes of each stack (the shallower “honey supers” — not shown in the photo above) and remove a few frames. She had a centrifugal spinner designed for four “frames” so we could process a few frames of honey extraction at a time.

We had no idea what to expect, but in the end, we pulled 24 lbs. (2 gallons) of the finest honey I’ve seen in these here parts out of just half of the frames in those three hives.

I had tended to the hives in the months prior, helping to feed them sugar water as the hives were getting established, and I only usually wore a beekeeper’s hood; I always wear a zip up shell jacket.

I have a few of them and it’s sort of my ‘trademark’ style, I guess. People mock me because I wear them in all weather, even if it’s hot out. But I like the zipper for my reading glasses and I like their all weather design.

So I didn’t really need the whole bee-suit getup. My jacket, gloves and the hood worked well enough. Well, to that point anyway.

D.B. and I started working on the hives, and we pulled out a few frames. I had a soft bristle brush and as we removed the frames with the honey, I brushed the bees off of both sides before we put the frame in a bucket.

The bees weren’t too thrilled with us at that time, and a cloud of them starting swirling around the hive that we had cracked open— but the first set of frames went well.

When we came back for the second hive, we started working on removing a few frames. I was wearing gloves, but didn’t have my sleeves tucked up properly, so at one point I had an exposed wrist. One of the bees got inside my sleeve and I got a sting. I don’t have a strong reaction to bee stings, so I shrugged it off and kept working.

A few minutes later, three bees managed to find the gap between the bottom of my hood and my jacket, and they got inside my hood. I got a few stings on my ears and one under my left eyelid.

I was a bit panicky with them inside my hood, and while I knew I wasn’t allergic to stings, I didn’t know how my body would react to three or four at once. To get clear of the cloud of bees, and to a place where I could remove my hood and get the bees out, I started running down the path toward my car.

I’ve had asthma for several years as an adult, and had it much worse as a young child. In 2023, after my move to Michigan from California, I had an especially bad season because of new allergens here and also kittens in our garage (cat pee is a major trigger for me), and for many months I struggled with pretty serious asthma episodes.

Toward the end of 2023, I stopped using albuterol and started using a more effective preventative treatment (something like Advair diskus, for those who know. It’s an inhaled powder that has a longer-lasting preventative effect on asthma.)

It worked pretty well keeping my asthma in check, and with just a single puff once a day, I didn’t need the ‘rescue inhaler’ albuterol much at all. I’d been taking this “disk” inhaler nightly for most of 2024.

But I kept an albuterol rescue inhaler in my car, just in case I had an attack. So, my thought as I’m running away from the bees was: get to my car, grab the inhaler just in case, then adjust my hood and go back.

When I got to my car, I was breathing hard because of a combination of running, my momentary panic—and I thought—a possible reaction to the bee stings. It felt like a moderately serious constriction was coming on.

I fumbled around the car looking for my inhaler, but it wasn’t there. For a moment, I got a bit more worried: what if this asthma gets really bad? What will I do? (It turns out that D.B. had albuterol in her truck, too, but I didn’t know that at the time.)

So, as I’m struggling to draw in breath, I got a bit more concerned.

But then something strange happened.

I use a specialized breathing technique to calm my asthma, so I put my hands on the hood of my car and I started to do that, but before I really go into it…the tightness in my bronchial tubes was gone.

Just…gone. As if I’d taken a shot of albuterol…except, I didn’t.

I went back to the hives to help D.B. continue work, shaking my head in amazement, and after we finished that hive, I tried on a spare suit that she had for the third hive.

But there was a tiny gap between the zippers on that new suit’s hood, and sure enough…another bee found it and got into my hood again! I took another sting under the same left eyelid (little bastards shared intel on where to get to me, I guess.)

This time, however, I wasn’t worried—and after five minutes the pain was gone and I waved it off. I had very mild puffiness and redness under my left eye the next day, but no pain.

Later that evening when I went home, I was expecting to take my daily preventative asthma inhaler (the Advair diskus stuff.) But strangely, I didn’t feel the usual symptoms that I feel when —after 24 hours—the prior dose has worn off; I can usually tell when it’s time for the daily replenishment.

I didn’t have that feeling, at all: for the first time since late December. I took note, went to bed, and skipped the dose.

The next day I felt *really* good; the stings on my hands and ears were mildly itchy, and the skin on my left hand looked slightly reddish and warm but the skin was smooth (like botox, only bee-tox!)

No ill effects from the stings, except for mild itchiness that cleared by the end of the day. Some of my “getting older” aches and pains seem to be eased, as well.

But that second evening…once again, I didn’t feel the “time to take a puff” sensation before my daily preventative dose. So, I skipped it again. Two days in a row.

I’m now on my fifth night, and I’m no longer dependent on that asthma med. That got me curious: could this have had something to do with the bee stings?

It turns out, that in fact it could (and in my case, I can say it definitely did.) It seems that the bee venom knocked out the residual inflammation that was triggering my asthma!

I had heard anecdotes from our Beekeeper who told us his own experience with stings (he reacts more strongly than I do, and keeps liquid Benadryl on hand) but he said it helped heal some skin lesions he had faster (he also uses honey as a topical treatment.)

Another person told us that a farmer they knew would purposefully get stung a few times every fall, because the stings eliminated his arthritis.

I did some research and low and behold: Bee Venom Therapy is a thing. In fact, it is a therapy that is thousands of years old. It has been used to treat pain from Arthritis, Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, and other auto-immune disorders. It has been used to treat allergies and asthma. There are claims it has a beneficial effect on certain cancers.

I had heard of these things here and there, but didn’t pay them much heed until my own chronic asthma seemed to be reversed after about eight or ten stings.

Now I know that there are stories where people develop allergies to bee stings later on, after not having been vulnerable; but given my relatively low reactivity (the sting is much milder than a mosquito welt, for me) I’m not going to be worried.

In fact, this fall, I may go ahead and get a few stings on the back of my hand and wrists again. Because its a miraculous therapy, for me at least.

Someday I may write some articles here about my experience from 2017-2020 as a world-class entomologist (raising black soldier flies at commercial scale.)

Some of you who know me personally know that I’ve had a pretty broad range of career and life experiences, but few know that in late 2019 I was recognized briefly worldwide for my team’s amazing successes with black soldier fly rearing.

We almost opened a 100,000 square foot factory in Central California the spring of 2020, but things blew apart for a variety of reasons, including the COVID mania. But that’s a story for another day.

I had to walk away from that new career in early 2020. But it taught me a few things about Insectories, and the work took me to some cool places like a USDA facility in Arizona that mass produces sterile boll weevils (a cotton pest) to distribute by air over cotton fields.

The work even took me to Wuhan China (yes, that Wuhan) for 10 days in 2018 to attend a world conference on insects (no, I vill NOT eet zee bugz…but I do know that they are a great natural nutrition supplement for poultry and fish feeds.)

This photo was from a recent camping trip up at the shores of Lake Michigan. Videl, my dog, doesn’t like to go in the water, but she does like a good snuggle.

Thank you to all of my loyal subscribers, and as always—if you’re not a paying subscriber but you can spare $5 a month, your support is greatly appreciated.

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