Laurence Edwards salvaged his £400 BBWear Ultra beekeeping suit after mold covered it in storage by soaking it in a strong bleach solution for three days, then machine washing at 60°C. The white fabric survived the aggressive bleach treatment, though the logos bleached out. His advice: store suits dry, but bleach and a hot wash will kill mold if it happens.
I have absolutely wrecked my £400 BBwear Ultra Suit by leaving it in really damp conditions, and it is covered literally top to bottom in mold. Safe to say I'm really, really annoyed, but in this video I'm going to do my very best to try and get all of this bleach out. And if you find yourself in a similar situation, hopefully it'll help you too. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to fill up one of these containers here with the same formulation of sodium hypochlorite that I use to sterilize my boxes. The idea being that it's a strong bleach solution and it should hopefully kill and bleach all of that mold and take it out of the bee suit. Now I know that anything that's not white on that bee suit will end up white as well, so it's probably going to bleach the logo, both the Black Mountain Honey and the BB Wear logo. I prefer to have bleached logos and a mold-free suit. I'm not wearing that suit in that condition, it's absolutely disgusting. So I'm going to fill this up with water, I'm going to put a good glug of sodium hypochlorite in there, take it up to the same level that I use in my sterilization videos, and then we'll come back in 3 or 4 days and see if we've managed to remove all of that mold from the BB Wear Ultra Suit. The sodium hypochlorite that I used in that batch had kind of expired a little bit. When I smelt it, wasn't anywhere near as strong as it was supposed to be, even though it was actually in the expiry date. I decided to go with a kind of like a fresher batch, and I didn't have any sodium hypochlorite, so I went with a normal standard thick bleach. Now in that container there, there was about 15 liters of water and I used 4 containers of thick bleach that had a concentration of 4.5 grams of sodium hypochlorite per 100 grams. So a 4.5% ratio compared to like the standard sodium hypochlorite that I used that was like say a 15%. So it's basically about 1/3 as strong. But you will not believe the results from using that bleach. Thick bleach, dirt cheap from B&M Bargains. Look what it has done to this bee suit. So how about that? Like, it is completely and utterly restored the bee suit and taken away any of that mold. I went in after 24 hours and you could still see the mold on there. I went in after 3 days and although it looked like the mold had gone, it had left loads of brown stains all over the pockets. Literally covering the entire jacket. So what I then did is I took it out, I washed off all of the bleach, I put it into the washing machine, 60-degree wash with 100 revolutions per minute spin. You don't want to spin these ultrasuits too fast, but I think you will agree the results are pretty impressive. So although I was completely negligible in terms of leaving it in a damp environment— it wasn't even that damp, it was a bit cold, it was a bit damp— the mold clearly started to grow on it. Took hold. But the brilliant benefit of these Ultra suits is because they're all white, you can just go ahead and bleach them as hard as possible without any detrimental effect on either the fabric or the mesh. Obviously, don't do what I've done. Don't leave your bee suits in a cold, damp environment. Don't let the mold form in the first place. But if it does form, bleach will sort it out, no problem.
