Scabby McStingsalot and The Dork Forest

Jackie Kashian does an educational interview about beekeeping for her podcast show, The Dork Forest.  They discuss everything from bears to knitting to bee diarrhea.  How can you bee-t that?  

There's this one drawback to bee stings that I never really considered when I started--I kind of look like an intravenous drug user.   My hands and spine especially are covered in little scabs and marks, and my hands are slightly puffy more often than not.  Sometimes I can't help but scratching them, especially the ones on the back of my neck because they feel like little zits.  And then I get little tiny pocky-marks like tweakers do when they are going through withdrawl.  Eww.  TMI.  Sorry.

The other day I had to get the bees out of the hive myself.  I had on a veil, long sleeved shirt, jeans, knee socks, and gloves, and I'll be damned if one didn't crawl up my pants leg and get me on the knee.  Five of the little bitches (they are all female, after all) clustered on my right hand glove and stung me AT ONCE on a 2 square inch area on the back of my hand.

I let them sting me because, hey--that's the goal, right?  But after a certain point I did re-lid the hive and run away.  They chased me around the yard and the porch for 10 damn minutes!  Oddly enough, when you're running to escape an angry mass of guard bees, bee stings don't hurt nearly as bad.  Go figure.

Back to The Dork Forest...I don't know what possessed me to do this, but after listening to the podcast, I looked up the website and sent her this email:

Hi Jackie, My friend sent me a link to your Dork Forest episode about beekeeping.  I have rheumatoid arthritis, and I use bees as medicine, which means that I sting myself with live bees.  I got 20 stings this morning.

I keep a blog about it if you are interested:  http://istingmyselfwithbees.blogspot.com

I'm also attending an apitherapy conference at the beginning of November to learn more about it.

I hope it isn't presumptuous of me to write to you--I thought it might make a good topic for your show. So if you think that you might be interested in doing an interview for your show, I think it would be TOTALLY COOL!!

And I got this reply shortly afterwards:

I am watching your short film!!  It's fascinating.

jackie

OMG.  What if I actually got to be on The Dork Forest?!?!? I feel like I need to do a magical dork dance while wearing a dwarf hat to make it happen.  Maybe this dwarf hat, which I am almost finished knitting:

P.S. If you want the pattern for this gnome, go here.