A Round of Stingers

When working the bees, many more of them light on me and yell at me and bang at my veil than actually sting me, and my hope had been that all those girls trying fervently to land one through the veil and the jacket were doomed to fail... and therefore to continue living.

If a honeybee stings, a honeybee dies, so even beside my own enlightened self interest there is plenty of reason to hope they don't get into attack mode during attempts to handle them.

I decided to wash my jacket and its hood/veil thing because of the general atmosphere of mayhem that prevailed by the time I finished yesterday. The bees leave behind pheremone traces of how they felt about you, and you can literally carry your bad karma around from hive to hive if you don't wash up. Sadly, as I took the veil off to launder the rest, I saw all the sad stingers still in place at various locations. So the lesson learned is that sometimes a bee can fail to sting me, yet still get stuck enough to perish in the effort.

Above is a slide with the stingers that were still in the hood by the time I got down to the laundry room. I picked them out to get a better look. My husband has a groovy digital microscope that we bought for the nieces and nephews, but we ended up liking it better.

There are more photos and stinging remarks at the right. I'm going to go up and attempt to telepathically transmit apologetic thoughts at the bees now.