I have this absolutely wonderful hand-face-whatever cream I picked up on the trip to Chicago. Don’t laugh. Carmindy of What Not To Wear swears by it. It’s from the Prairie Soap Co, in Deadwood, (actually from a town near) and what I’ve got uses real buffalo tallow and lavender and sage. I can attest it’s real, since a bee very regrettably decided I was a flower, and when I tried to shoo him off, the poor thing gave his all, and stung me right above the elbow. Not in the joint, for which I’m grateful, but I went ahead and finished out the job I was on, at least for four of the eight filter pads that take algae out of the pond, before I decided it was getting painful and I really needed to treat it. So, topical Benedryl, internal Benedryl, and ice. I’ve discovered the bands you use to correct patellar tracking are real good for keeping an ice cell-pack in place, so here I sit. Mid-scene, and I have to take a med that makes me stupid.
Alas, poor bee. I do all I can to cultivate things they like and they liked me better. I won’t put on that handcream just before garden work again.
Had another demise, too: Huey, last of the EcoSphere shrimp, in the little glass egg I’ve nursed through 3 moves and an 8-day winter power-out, demised at the age of 16. Jane says I should get a new egg. I think I may. 16 years is a good lifespan for a shrimp. I could get the EcoSphere recharged, but it would be as pricey as a new one, and it’s serious postage. Amazon carries them.
I got the little fellow (and five others in the egg) when I sold off my marine tank and all the freshwater tanks when we moved up from Oklahoma. And I’ve had him ever since. When I was in University, my room mate dated a guy who was a son of one of the German rocket scientists, whose ‘thing’ was developing life support for space; and we used to help him (both of us being aquarium geeks) figure out how to balance an ecosystem that would run on sunlight. Well, his name isn’t on the project that finally produced the EcoSphere, but it was out of NASA tech, and I was intrigued. Originally I had Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Winken, Blinken, and Nod. Huey lost his last room mate Dewey a couple of years ago, and he soldiered on eating his algae and bacteria alone, but with a lot going on outside his pod, until his 16th year, almost exactly, since I got him in early summer of 2000.
That’s the right treatment for a bee sting…..I used to use a product called “After Bite”, which is essentially household ammonia in a small applicator pen. I don’t use it any longer, as it tends to turn the area around the sting site an ugly black. Black near wounds makes me think of necrosis, and the ammonia really didn’t relieve the itching. When I first started using it, things would be fine, but after several years, and several stings later, it didn’t.
I’ve also tried a paste of baking soda on the sting site, but if you’re getting relief from the ice and the double-sided Benadryl treatments, I believe the baking soda is superfluous.
Bees aren’t usually aggressive, but if she (yes, females sting, males lack stingers, as it’s a modified egg-laying organ) felt threatened, she would try to escape. If there were no escape that she could find, she’d resort to stinging.
I didn’t know shrimp could live that long! Did we ever see them when we were out there? I don’t recall it, if we did. Maybe because the marine tank seems to overwhelm my memories of the aquaria you have.
The correct treatment for beestings depends on how much you react to the venom, which as Joe noted can and does change.
The herbal lotion was a bit of a fluke, you probably just freaked a suicidal bee. The family bees used to buzz around a bit when I used floral shampoos but the smell that really ticked them off was stale sweat and beer. (Which I’m sure was not an issue in your instance) My dad used clean coveralls when going through the hives. The theory was that you didn’t want to smell anything like a bear.
here’s something I forgot to mention, and Teasel just reminded me……alarm pheromones. The alarm pheromone that honey bees use to alert the colony smells like bananas. I could never figure out why they’d get upset when I’d work them after lunch, if I’d had a banana with lunch. Then I was reading in one of the bee magazines and one article in particular mentioned it.
I don’t know if there is any banana oil in the lotion you were using, or an artificial equivalent that smells like banana oil.
OK, “banana oil” is amyl acetate and/or isoamyl acetate, which is how it should appear on ingredients lists. “Pentyl” is the IUPAC “correct” synonym for “amyl”. Isoamyl is the alarm pheromone. It’s also in pear oil.
Paul, BS Chemistry, CSULB ’67.
Thanks, Joe, I was hoping you’d chime in. Yep, just stabs of pain now and again. Darn it. She had plenty of room to flee: I was trying to wave her away, but I had a hose in my hand, and she may have gotten hit by a water drop and landed on my arm.
No, I doubt you would have noticed the shrimp: the glass egg sits in the kitchen on a decorative shelf. They’re a specially long-lived variety, little red guys, Hawaiian, that tend to occupy lava at seaside.
My mother always swore by household ammonia for bee/wasp stings and jellyfish stings.
If you have a touch of arthritis in the elbow the sting may actually bee a benefit!
Benedryl is great stuff but it does tend to turn the user into living in fog city.
Wise decision to have someone clean your gutters. Ours have filled with leaf bits and caterpillar crap which evidently is an excellent growing medium as we are beginning to resemble the Hanging Gardens of Babylon!
I keep a jar of Meat Tenderizer with my garden supplies and make a paste to put on the sting as soon as it happens. You should not leave it on for more than thirty minutes as it will cause a rash.
We are hoping to finish the pool by tomorrow!
Benadryl internally applied makes me sleep for 10 hours. SO it’s strictly for when I can be a vegetable for that length of time.
I use the cream on some of my external itchies, though – I get itchy bumps that respond to it nicely.
Meat tenderizer is largely made of dried papaya. Yarrow is another good antiseptic, anti-swelling painkiller of the aspirin family.
Pull the whole plant while it is in flower and the sun is on it. Chop or macerate the plant and cove it in olive oil. heat it either in a double boiler or the oven for a couple of hours. Stain the plant matter from the oil. Mix in a quarter to a third the volume of the resulting oil of cocoa butter and let cool.
I’d just buy a papaya and rub the cut fruit on the bug sting, then eat the rest 😀
I wonder if dried papaya would work! I think if I kept papaya in my garden tote I would attract many bugs!
If papaya works (papain is a proteolytic enzyme) then one ought to experiment with pineapple. Bromolain (pineapple is a bromilead) is another proteolytic enzyme–the reason one can’t make Jello with fresh pineapple chunks (one must use “denatured” canned/cooked pineapple).
I am amazed that a shrimp lived for 16 years, and have never heard of Ecospheres. Sounds intriguing.
I usually use cortisone cream for itches, but topical Benadryl sounds like just the thing for a bee sting. I’ll have to add some to the medicine stash.
Very interesting on the home remedies!
I just finished a bottle of cranberry-mango juice, which reminded me somewhat of a peach blend. Very good, can’t wait to get more at the store, hopefully during the week.
I’m sitting here trying to remember if I’ve ever had any adverse reactions to Benadryl. — I have had an idiosyncratic reaction to Tylenol twice, which has made me leery of it. (Aspirin instead.) I know for sure I can’t handle sulfa drugs. I had a severe allergic reaction during a bout with some bug as a young teen. Went in to see the doctor, who took one look at the rash (all over, in my scalp and ears too that morning) and told me seriously never to take that again. He switched me to a different prescription promptly to get the rest of the bug.
However, those are the only two meds I know I’m allergic to. I am thankfully not allergic to penecillin, and I do fine with milk products. (Mostly European American ancestry with a bit of Native American Indian in there, at least two places, if family lore is true.) Therefore sure I’m not lactose-intolerant. Note the Indian bckground would be Cherokee or nearby allied tribes, both in Virginia (around 1776 to 1830’s before the Trail of Tears) and in Texas / Oklahoma Territory (mid- to late 1800’s, after, but two sides, paternal and maternal, of my family.).
The A Word – I’ve just seen a trailer for this upcoming series. Christopher Eccleston plays one of the regulars. The series is about a familly raising a young son who’s on the Autism Spectrum. From the trailer, there was a ton of good stuff showing the problems of raising a child with any sort of “differently abled condition” (the current euphemism) or “special needs” (the other current euphemism. This showed the struggles the parents and siblings and relatives were going through, and something of what the young son was going through. Oh boy, does that resonate with me. Looking back as an adult, I can see how my parents must have struggled with this, without much support or information. Even today, there’s not enough out there for kids or parents or other allies, and the systems usually are somewhat patchy and dysfunctional. The family situation is usually not so well equipped either. I can look back and see things where my parents did a great job, and other things where they did badly, when they were intending to do right. Some of this, I’m still only now realizing. Their personalities and strangths and weaknesses played into this, as did their beliefs and the prevailing wisdom at the time. So seeing flashes of this in the brief series trailer was, I thought, very insightful and truthful. Real families, and the person him/herself go through this very sort of thing, trying to raise a child who is different from most other “normal” kids. The season pass on iTunes is about $13, and I plan to do that when I can. The first ep is available there as a free download. I presume this is going to be available from other streaming services (Amazon, Netflix, etc.). The channel is listed as Sundance TV, and the cast are all British / UK.