I learn everything the hard way! Installing NUCS

My husband is quite enamored with our honey and so, we got more bees. We bought two nucs with russian queens this year. Just picked them up and installed them on Saturday. Bought a bee keeping suit this year, first time wearing it. I learned some valuable lessons. Tape the velcro part of your bee keeping suit because while moving about your zipper might come a bit undone and then bees can march right up into your hood. Two stings in the neck and my husband was stung in the hand removing one from my pony tail. Life! At that point I put tape across the velcro portion of my hood. I also realized I had a smoker and other various bee keeping tools I'd bought and never used before. Totally forgot about them. So my lovely husband got the smoker going and boy does it make a huge difference when working with the bees. I didn't have any other issues and actual bee keeping tools just make it so much easier than using cat bars and screw drivers. No more stings.

My neck, however, is still awful. It itches like crazy, it's super red and the bumps are fairly pronounced. It's driving me nuts!!!


Bees have settled in fine though.

Bees shouldn’t be able to get in around the zip, if it is secured properly -  even without extra tape. It sounds like you are beekeeping with a buddy. I teach my students to always do a buddy check on each other before starting. Is everything zipped up, tucked in, Velcro pressed down firmly?

Even with all that, stings still happen. I once took 100+ stings in two minutes tHROUGH my suit. I was in the process of killing a hyper aggressive colony and my suit pulled tight over the skin of my inner thigh.

Brought a tear to my eye, that one did!

Michael Cox wrote:Bees shouldn’t be able to get in around the zip, if it is secured properly -  even without extra tape. It sounds like you are beekeeping with a buddy. I teach my students to always do a buddy check on each other before starting. Is everything zipped up, tucked in, Velcro pressed down firmly?

Even with all that, stings still happen. I once took 100+ stings in two minutes tHROUGH my suit. I was in the process of killing a hyper aggressive colony and my suit pulled tight over the skin of my inner thigh.

Brought a tear to my eye, that one did!

Maybe my suit is cheap. I tried to find reviews for suits but they all seemed pretty biased so I just bought cheap ones, not gonna lie there. So it has velcro on either side of the zipper on the front to hold a flap down from the hat. I was pretty pressed up against the nuc box so I could reach over it and stick the frames in the hive so the bees were really on the front of me and they just climbed right up the zipper and into my hat. lol Tape solved the issue but boy, tough lesson to learn.

I'm not going to lie, I don't know that I could survive 100 stings. 2 is killing me. IT ITCHES SO MUCH!!!

I did work experience in high school with an old beekeeper. He sprayed the bees with a fine mist of sugar water instead of smoking them. He said he found it worked better and was less stressful to the bees. And yeah, they were way too busy lapping up all that sugar to care what we were doing at all! He gave me a hood to wear, but really I didn't need it at all. These were almost feral bees that weren't his, but he went and checked on once a year as a favour. Maybe they were always pretty chill.

Never got around to bees of my own, so no real experience with the method myself.  I like the idea, though.

Ouch Elle. We can feel your pain. I get stung about once a year on average. This year it was in the eyelid. Not fun. Not even a little. What worked for me is ... ease the stinger out then put some toothpaste on the sting. That eases the immediate pain but in this case I also took some generic Benadryl (diphenhydramine) because that seems to minimize the longer term effects like itching & swelling.

Double ouch Michael. Never had the experience of 100 bee stings at once but had around 20 scorpions stings at about age 6. That might be comparable. I still check my shoes every time now.

I copped over 100 stings , when I tried to use a repellant instead of a hood.
I often work the hives with no protection other than the hood.
BUT DONT USE A REPPELLANT
just like sweat they do not like it and attacked me.
had a blind date that night, went well. But no enough to get another 100 stings!