Beekeeper Connor

Saturday September 13^th was Honey extracting day! It was a little late in the season especially this year because we had some pretty cold days earlier in the fall. But that was the day we could set aside to get the extractor. So Connor headed up to his parents to start getting the hives torn apart and the honey taken in the house. He had his sister Eden help him just because it is a hard job for just one. So around 10:30 Carson and I hopped on the four wheeler (Connor had taken all the keys to all our vehicles with him) so we could go up and see and get a vehicle to run to Logan and get some errands done. We got up there and started watching and he got stung on his arm. This is a common occurrence for him as he is around the bees a lot, he also got stung through his glove a few minutes later. Well Eden told us to go get some Allergy pills for him because he was starting to react. This is not normal for Connor. He has never had a problem with stings from his bees, but did have a reaction at one point to the kind of Bee’s a fellow beekeeper has that he has helped with. So I go up to the house with Carson and find the Benadryl and some water, well it did take a little longer than just running up there and back because I had Carson and could not find anything. I wasn’t worried because Connor never has a problem. Well as I walked out of the house Eden has come up running to get it because I was too slow. By the time Connor got it he was shaking and itchy and red and feeling light headed. Then his face (not where he was stung) started to swell and he thought he was going to pass out. He managed to make it out to the side of the road as his brother Jeff and his kids showed up. I ran and got the car and we headed down to Instacare. So glad there is one a mile away now. We got there and he looked scary. Nice and red and swollen and he had been pulling on his hair and with being overdue for a haircut it just added to the picture. Sadly I didn’t think to take a picture at this time. Kind of freaking out here…. So we called his parents to have them come meet us so they could take Carson back home so we wouldn’t have to take care of him. We got back pretty quick and his breathing was fine but he was freaking out. They gave him some steroid shots and we waited.  It took him quite a while to get calmed down but once he had he looked great and felt great. We left about an hour later and headed back to the house. They warned us if he got stung again in the next few days it would be a whole lot worse than the reaction he had already. We headed up to his moms to extract honey. Now this is a very long process. Like all day for extracting and cleaning up. We ended up with 80 Pounds of Honey which we split with his parents. We sold most of our portion but kept some for ourselves of course! It was great! It really is amazing Honey!