The speaker's wife Helen was stung while he changed queen cages and went into severe anaphylaxis, requiring two adrenaline injections and 11 hours in A&E. She recovered fully, but he's sharing the story to warn beekeepers to always carry an in-date EpiPen and antihistamines like Piriton.
We had a major drama yesterday within the business. Whilst I tell you about it, have a look at this frame and see if you can spot anything that's wrong, and I'll tell you why that's important at the end of the video. So we were changing some queen cages over yesterday. Helen, my wife, got stung on the finger and within seconds went into a severe allergic reaction— anaphylaxis. I immediately took her down to the doctors, which is luckily only about 5 minutes away. She took a Piriton on the way, and when they got in there, they gave her an adrenaline shot straight away, and that did not work. So they had to give her another adrenaline shot, which only just about brought the swelling down. So severe swelling, um, really high— or low heart rate, I should say— really low blood pressure. Apparently Helen was out of it for a lot of the time. Thankfully she is okay now. But a really important lesson there, which is make sure if you are allergic you have an EpiPen. Make sure your EpiPen is in date. Make sure you always have some Piraton just in case. And if you're wondering why I'm looking at this frame and kind of thinking, what am I going to do with this now? This is the frame of cells that was due to emerge yesterday, and that was my job. And I had to quickly rush out here and obviously take Helen to hospital and A&E, and we were there for about 11 hours. Thankfully everything is okay, all apart from this frame which has got about 6 virgins that has emerged and completely ruined what I was about to do. But hey ho, my wife is safe. A mega Thank you to everybody who helped out yesterday. You know who you are. And to anybody else out there, just make sure you take all precautions you need to, because these bees here can be the difference between life and death, and it can happen very, very quickly. So take warning.
