Laurence Edwards spent a decade beekeeping and noticed his bee sting reactions got milder over time, but he's unsure if that's lasting tolerance or if the body has a limit before anaphylaxis hits. He describes a fellow beekeeper whose immunity suddenly failed with a life-threatening reaction, and asks viewers which they've experienced.
I've taken a fair few stings in my lifetime, but do you build up a tolerance to the more stings you take, or are you just one sting away from a nasty accident? This is a really important topic we're talking about today. Obviously on this channel you see me get stung loads, and it's a little bit of a running joke, I know, but it's a very serious matter to talk about. You can die from one single bee sting. And that doesn't matter if you've been stung 1,000 times before or it's the very first time you've been stung. There are 2 trains of thought with this. One is the more you get stung, the greater your body's responses in order to be able to manage that anaphylaxis, which means that you get a much lesser reaction for each sting that you take. The other train of thought though is that you can only take a finite number of stings before your body punishes you and you go into overload And that can be a really dangerous event. Now, I can only talk from my own experience, but I see a lot of this stuff discussed on the internet. In this video, I'm just going to explore a little bit into those 2 options, tell you which camp I fall into, and tell you why I think I'm going to be a little bit more careful going forward to try and avoid those bee stings. So let's rewind 10 years before I'd even picked up a frame in anger. If I ever got stung by a bee or got stung by a wasp— and I do get slightly different reactions to both of those But 10 years ago, before I was a beekeeper, if I got stung, I would have, I would say, a mild to medium reaction. If I got stung in the face, my face would swell up, it would get puffy. I would have to take Piraton or some form of drug in order to ease that swelling, because otherwise it just wouldn't go away. Now, as I moved into beekeeping, I used to take more and more stings, and I used to get quite a bad reaction to it. So you'll see this picture here. This would be pretty indicative of my early days in beekeeping. Poor quality suit. Angry bees, beekeeping suit that wasn't washed, gloves that weren't washed. You couldn't get a better situation for bees to sting you in the tens and in the hundreds. I'd get to the end of the day, and I'd be taking Piraton throughout the day as well to keep that swelling down, and I'd get to the end of the day and my arms would be like Popeye. Not in a good way. They would be so big and so swollen, and over the next few days I'd have to take Piraton to kind of keep that swelling down. And my arms would start to hurt and they would start to throb. Now, over time, I have certainly built up an immunity to these bee stings. You see me get stung in the face now, I can take kind of 5 or 6 stings in the face and have no swelling at all. And I'm not saying that in a proud way, and I definitely think there's room for me to stop getting stung in the face so much. But anytime I get stung now, as long as I go and take the sting out straight away, doesn't matter how many times I get stung— obviously we're not talking hundreds and thousands of stings But say I take 3 or 4 stings to the face and maybe 10 stings on the arm. If I get all those stings out, I don't need to take pyrethroid anymore, and within an hour or so, it's like I've never been stung. I've certainly built up a level of immunity, but is that immunity indefinite, and could something go wrong in the future? Now, I speak to a lot of people on this because they say, you're getting stung in the face, you do realize that you can only get stung a finite number of times and then your body rejects it and you can have really bad issues with it. I've got a close friend whose mother is in the exact same situation. Been a beekeeper for years, didn't really have much of a reaction, thought they'd built up an immunity, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, had a terrible, terrible event where they got stung by a bee and went into anaphylaxis. And they went to go and speak to the doctors, and it turns out they've got a massive allergy now to bee stings. I just can't understand how that works, but it definitely is true because I hear that from so many different people. from people that I believe and people that I trust. And I'd like to know which camp you fit into there. Have you built up an immunity to bee stings? Or do you react really, really badly? Or are you going through a process of immunotherapy in order to build up a tolerance to bee stings? If you sit in any of those 3 camps, definitely stick a comment below. Let's do a little bit of a poll and see where the majority of people sit. Personally, I'm gonna take that advice on board and I'm gonna do whatever I can to try and limit the amount of stings that I take. Taking all of that into account, if you do enjoy seeing me get stung in the face, Check out this video, first 10 seconds, 2 stings to the face.
