Five Ways To Upgrade Your Beekeeping Suit - Simple Modifications For Better Protection

In this video, I'm going to give you 5 tangible tips for making sure that your bee suit is better than anything that you can buy off the rack. Now, I've had a lot of different bee suits. I've bought them, I've used them, I've broken them, and I do really like the BB Wear Ultra Suit. They don't pay me to say that. I pay for the suits. It genuinely is the best bee suit on the market. However, I've bought a couple of these now, and I've had to make a few adjustments to make sure that I'm getting the perfect B suit. All of these recommendations here apply to every single type of B suit that you can buy, and I'm going to put this down now because it's hurting my arm. So my first recommendation to you if you're going and buying a B suit is go and get measured for your B suit, or at least go and try on the ones that are on the rack. I know generally people will buy a B suit online and it will come, and I just know so many people that have bought the B suit and it's just wrong. 2 things that are generally wrong with B suits One is that your body, like your torso from your chin down to your waist, it tends to not be the right size on bee suits. And I think there's a lot of variation in humans, and they don't seem to work when it comes to bee suit design. So for me, I always get an extra 3 inches in the back. I make the bee suit longer. I find the difference between an extra large bee suit and an extra extra large bee suit is just like fatter tummy. That's all they ever do is they just make the tummy really fatter. So I've done this a few times now. I bought an extra large and it didn't fit, it wasn't long enough. So I thought, well, I'll go for the XXL, and it was just exactly the same length and just fatter. So that didn't fit either. So my first piece of advice is always go and try and get custom fit. You can get custom fit, go for a baggy fit. That's number 2. You don't want something that's tight fitting. I know some people say you look like the Michelin Man in your big white baggy bee suit, But it's so much better. It really does mean that you have an enjoyable beekeeping experience. You've got the flexibility to move, and it means you've got no tight spots where the bees can sting you through the material. They can't do that on the Ultra Bee Suit, but on any of the polycotton bee suits, if you lean over like that and you get a tight bit, the bee will come through and it will sting you in the bum, and it hurts. So the last thing in terms of sizing is also check out the arms. Now, talking specifically about the BB Wear Ultra Suit here, The element of the wrists, the polycotton on the Ultrawear BB suit, in my opinion, is too long. So I had it custom made so it is only 1 inch long. You need a little bit there so that they can put the wrist guards on, the little thumb pulls, but I don't need 6 inches of polycotton. And I found when I had the original version of the suit, I got stung quite a bit through the wrists, and it hurt, really did hurt, because that was the only place that the bees could sting. So it meant I was getting localized stings right in the wrist. So my custom design was 1-inch polycotton on the wrists, but I also extended the wrists down really, really far, probably too far, but I got to a point where they come down beyond my fingers and I just roll them up like that and I have real bagginess on my arms. Again, it doesn't look good, but it means that whatever I'm doing, whatever way I move, the suit doesn't pull up and it means that I've got good coverage between my long gauntlet gloves and the bee suit. There's no gaps, there's nowhere for the bees to get in. I learned that the hard way. Cost me £350, bought the suit and it doesn't fit. So check for sizing, check for length, and check for your arms. So when I had an opportunity to get another custom-made suit, I took that opportunity to make sure that I had every single thing that I wanted on that bee suit. Now I might be an outlier in the population here, but I have quite a big phone. So I have a Samsung Galaxy 23 Ultra now, and you do see this transition towards a bigger smartphone. So on the original BB Wear suit, I couldn't get my phone in the pocket, just wouldn't fit. So the only way I could do it was opening up the Velcro tabs and putting it in. And then what happens when I bend over? It falls out. Drove me mad. So I said to BB Wear, I want you to cut me some custom-made pockets. And they did, and they're huge. And everyone looks at my bee suit and says, Oh my God, your pockets are so huge! And I say, yeah, check this out though. Not only are they huge, but they've got Velcro all the way along the top, which I think is standard now, but also a zip. It's great. You don't get this on the normal suits, which means that I have got full security not only to put my phone in my pocket, but to keep things that I use all the time in my bee suit in the pockets. We're talking queen cages, we're talking crown of thorns, we're talking pens, Anything else you want to keep in there, keep them in the pockets. And I've got this double combo with Velcro and zips on every single one of my BBR Ultra suits now. So you can see my bottom pockets as well, extra-large pockets with the full-length Velcro and the zips. Really is a game changer. It means you can get everything in your B-suit and you can just go out knowing full well that everything is there and you're never without something that you really urgently need. So I know this probably looks like an arm, but it's not. I'm holding the suit upside down. The same thing applies to the polycotton at the bottom of the BBwear Ultra suit. You can see that I've just got 1 inch of polycotton just so they can get the little bit of elastic in there. On the normal suit, it comes up to like here, and people were reporting that you could get stung underneath the wellies. So loads and loads of this really good BBwear Ultra material, which is genuinely the best material I've found for a bee suit. Completely sting-proof. I've never once been stung. And you know some of my bees, they are very, very techy. And even when there's thousands, tens of thousands of them around, they can't get through that material. But also it's the breathability that I love. I know it sounds like an advertorial. Again, I'm not being paid to say this, genuinely my own advice. It breathes better than any of the other suits that I've tried. You can work in your pants, pants and a vest, because I find it a little bit itchy if you don't have a vest on, and a water sprayer, and you just kind of spray yourself with water like that on a hot summer's day, you'll be glad if you have a breathable suit like this one. So of course, get yourself a little bit of branding. Can't beat a branded bee suit. And that's it, they're my top tips for customizing your bee suit, and I can highly recommend the BB Wear Ultra Suit. If you found that useful, please give it the thumbs up, hit the subscribe button. We've got tons more beekeeping content on my No Nonsense Beekeeping channel.