After the concerned and somewhat horrified responses received three weeks ago by our Facebook wall readers, I was reluctant to post on our Heavenly Honey wall that yesterday one of the honeybees stung me in the face. The experience of being perused by one of the guard bees was irritating, but certainly not frightening.
I was standing about eight feet from the bee yard--observing the comings and goings as I often do. I like to watch the bees. Seeing the pollen booties that they collect on their hind legs is exciting; it lets me know that they are having a successful day out and about the Monkton Ridge area.
While surveying their activity, out of my right peripheral vision, I noticed one bee started to circle me.
It was giving audible clues that it was not happy with my proximity to her queen. I've learned over the years that sudden movement is best to be avoided when encountering an annoyed honeybee, so I stood still for a about ten seconds, hoping that it would detect that I was no threat, and that she would return to her hive. However, this gal wasn't getting board with me; therefore, I decided that I would begin to walk slowly backwards away from the apiary.
STING--I had been dive-bombed into the left side of my cheek where the jawbone intersects with the cheekbone. I swiped at the attacked spot with my hand to get the bee off from my face, and then the bee proceeded to pursue me harder than a male cat after his Queen (name for female cats of breeding age) in heat. It was tangled up in my hair, and buzzing frenziedly. I shouldn't have been concerned because a honeybee normally looses its stinger upon stinging, thus making her continued attack futile. But I wasn't sure about this loss because I had swiped so quickly it seemed that I was just grazed by her venom, and there wasn't a stinger in my face. Therefore, just in case the stinger was still with the bee, I was wrestling with my hair to get the honeybee to release. I think that I lost one of my favorite earrings and two barrettes in this tussle amongst two feet tall blades of grass.
I'm sure some of the old-timers in beekeeping would have found this an amusing sight to behold, and warranted of a few hardy chuckles. However, these past four years the bees in my apiary have treated me with royalty. I haven't encountered oodles of stings, so I'm just not accustomed to them yet. Thus the two stings that I received three weeks ago and the severe reaction that my fingers had to them frightened people when they saw my posted wall photos. I wasn't concerned, (irritated beyond measure because of the incessant itching), and I completely understood that I wasn’t having a systemic, anaphylaxis life-threatening type of allergic reaction. It was just a local reaction that my fingers swelled up to the point of looking like a Ball Park Frank, and I thought that they would pop! If I'm lucky, this latest sting will help to alleviate some jaw pain that I've been having. This will be a very good thing, and well worth the sting. I'm more concerned that my Facebook posts are freaking out our followers, and making them scared of the honeybee, so I didn't tell them about yesterdays sting to my face. You won’t tell them either—will you?
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