Deadly Hobbys and Swarms

After work it is my usual routine to go look out my bedroom window and see what the hives are doing before getting dinner or heading out to a little league baseball game with my son and wife. Today I was planning on letting my wife put a honey super on the brown hive as I had a feeling that they needed the room. When I looked out the window I saw a familiar site of a very large swarm hanging up in the same tree that the previous swarms had landed in.   We had been pretty diligent in hive inspections and had done a pre-swarm split with the Blue hive and opened the Brown hives' brood nest in put in empty frames with starter strips in the hopes of slowing or stopping the swarm urge until we could give them more room or do the split. Originally we were planning on doing the inspection/split on Saturday but something came up, something crazy.

I was tired Thursday evening so instead of going to a little league game I stayed home. Sometimes I like to go up on the roof and just watch the bees do their thing. Not sure why but this is very relaxing for me.  I headed up and noticed the outer lid on the blue hive (the queenless one) was off kilter so reached over and adjusted it.  A few bees started to buzz my face so I turned around and lowered my head while walking away from the back of the hive. Suddenly a bee gave up her life as it left its stinger in my eyelid. I had been stung before while working on the hives. On my hands, arms, leg and once on the crack on my posterior!  I have never had more than a local reaction and was only concerned that my eye was now going to swell up.  Inside the house grabbing an ice pack  I noticed my ears were getting warm and my skin was turning red. I don't have allergys  so had never felt this feeling of wanting to scratch the insides of my incredibly itchy eardrums. There was no thought in my head that I was suffering from anaphylactic shock as my breathing was fine.  Calling my wife to let her know  was probably the best thing I did that evening. I wasn't doing to bad and told here i would call if it got worse. I never called but in her amazing ability to know if things are not ok she called and I asked her to come home from the game down the street.\

By the time she arrived about 5-10 minutes later I had vomited twice and then proceeded to pass out on the kitchen floor. 911 was called, I came to and for some reason had to go into the bathroom where I passed out again. The paramedics  arrived shortly after, they couldn't read my blood pressure and gave me a shot of Epinephrine to get it going.  Seems that the common preconception about anaphylactic shock is that it affects your breathing. It might but it also can affect your blood pressure causing death. I spent the next 7 hours at the hospital because of the possibility of returning symptoms.  Probably one of the scariest moments of my life lying on the floor wondering what the hell was going on. If you are deciding to take up beekeeping or are a beekeeper already don't think because you never had a bad reaction to a sting that you won't.  Carry or have an EpiPen auto epinephrine injector close by. Don't wait to call for assistance if you feel at all not normal.  It might save your life. More on the swarm in the next post, and a very public thank you to my wife for letting me continue to keep bees (she must really love me!)