Originally Posted by Chase

Thanks for the greetings, Shel and Phillips. Nice site you folks have here.

Kaitlin, questions to an old teacher is like a bell to an old fire horse--makes us all excited.

Like most longtime beekeepers, I seldom wear gloves when working inside the hive because gloves tend to make keepers careless and crush bees. Even if workers and drones are expendable, one bee is the queen, and she's vital to the hive and honey production. So I get stung on the hands once or twice a day. I'm not alergic, so it just hurts like hell for a couple minutes. The most I was ever stung was forty times on the face and neck when my hat and veil were knocked off while working a hive of Texas bees (nasty little bitches). I got out the epinephrine injector just in case, but only lumped up, didn't have trouble breathing.

I have heard that a history of stings can increase the chance of anaphylaxis, but in my case the more I'm stung, the less is my local reaction. So far, so good.

The current mystery malady affecting hives is Colony Collapse Disorder. The novel I'm working on is a fiction about its cause.