The Sting of Beekeeping
“Benadryl and Coors Light. Lots of both,” is how John Sumners copes with a bee sting. And he should know. In his just over two years as a beekeeper, he’s been stung, “Well over a hundred times. Maybe more.”
John’s path to beekeeping began as a way to keep the agricultural exemption on the near 10 acres he lives on just outside of Fredericksburg, Texas. “I let a guy run a few cows on the place to get the exemption, but the animals just scalped the place. I thought bees would be an easy alternative.”
Spoiler Alert: Bees weren’t and continue not to be an easy alternative.
At first John tried to have local beekeepers place bees on his property. But after months of no one returning his inquiries, he decided to go it alone. “I went down the You Tube rabbit hole and studied everything I could regarding bee keeping then dove on in.” That dive required a lot of material investment and came at a pretty hefty price. “I bought four nucs – which is the box system the bees live in that most people call a hive – at $300 per nuc, three packs of bees at $200 per pack, 14 boxes at $50 per box, two adult and two child suits and veils, gloves, smokers, feeders, and a $500 Oxalic Acid Vaporizer that’s used to kill mites in the nucs…Yeah, the initial investment was pretty crazy.”
Despite the upfront cost, John has been happy with his investment as the ag exemption it allowed dropped his taxes from, “about $3,000 to $7 a year.” But that investment came with painful consequences. “I’ve been stung well over a hundred times and almost everywhere on my body you could think of. No one on the You Tube videos I watched ever got stung. I’ve been nailed plenty. They’ve got me on my toes, wrist, arm, ankle, knee, butt, butt crack, back of neck, eyebrow, lip, top of ear…on and on and on.”
Some of John’s pain has come from his not wearing a suit while feeding his bees or wearing his two-piece suit [separate pants and a shirt] that, “has pants that drop like a plumber’s every time I kneel over. I bend over and I get plumber’s crack and it’s a welcome call / bullseye / invitation. They fly in and get me anywhere they can.” The bees have even found a way into John’s one-piece suit thanks to some help from rodents. “I started keeping my suits out in the barn. I’m guessing a mouse chewed it up and I put it on without noticing the hole he’d made. I’m out tending the nucs, and there’s just a storm of bees in front of my veil. I didn’t notice there was one in my veil until he nailed me in the eyelid. Tried to staple my lid to my eyeball with his stinger. That one really hurt. Said, ‘I’m outta here.’ Went back to the house for some therapy.”
Again, that would be “Benadryl and Coors Light. Lots of both. Even with that I swelled up like that grotesque from the Goonies. Hey you guys!”The worst John ever got it was when he tried tending to his bees sans any suit. “They were being pretty friendly until they weren’t. About 15 to 20 or them nailed me at once. It was so bad I thought I was going to have to use my EpiPen. I didn’t have too though. I just added Maker’s Mark to my therapy.”
John currently has 300,000 or so bees on his property and in his two years of tending bees has harvested over 400 pounds of honey. His 13-year-old son Gus and 10-year-old daughter Mary Jane now help him some (they haven’t been stung near as many times as John) and have even named the queens. “We have Beyonce, Queen Victoria, Queen Isabella, Queen Latifah…a ton of them.”
Despite the stings and other pains of beekeeping John says he’s in it for the long haul. “I enjoy it a lot more than I thought I would. And it’s a constant learning experience. A sometimes painful one but it’s fun for the most part.”
This piece first appeared in the Fredericksburg Standard.
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