Bee Bearding

Facial hairs and beards are usual things, but ever thought of having bee beard! A bee beard is really something to behold.

 



Tibor Szabo, the winner at the Bee Beard Competition held in Canada



Every year, the unusual Bee Beard competition is held at the Clovermead Bees & Honey in Ontario, Canada. Several brave contestants participate in the competition to grab the title of "Best Beard”. The object of the Bee Beard Competition is to get as many bees on your body as possible. Contenders are weighed before and after they are covered in bees, and the heaviest one wins. This year’s Bee Beard Competition winner was Tibor Szabo, from Guelph, Ontario, who managed to cover his entire head, neck, shoulders and hands with honey bees.





Bee bearding is the practice of wearing several hundred thousand honey bees on the face. It is a mass of honey bees crawling on your face and it looks like a beard. Bee beards have been around since the 1700s and up until a hundred years ago, honey vendors used them to attract customers, but now bee bearding is mainly done for fun, and for charity.

 

Attempt for bee beard world record in 2005

In 1998, Mark Biancaniello from America successfully wore 350,000 bees, weighing just over 87 pounds, and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records for "most pounds of bees worn on the body”. In 2005 an Irish beekeeper has tried - and failed - to take the world record for a "bee beard" despite attracting 200,000 onto his body. He was to wear a full one hundred pounds of bees, but failed when only 60 pounds of bees landed on his body. In 2009, couple Li Wenhua and Yan Hongxia of Ning'an, China, both beekeepers, married while both were covered in bees.

If you’ve ever wondered how on Earth these people get thousands of bees clustered on their bodies, today is your lucky day. As you probably already know, every bee hive has its queen, a kind of ultimate star of the bee world that everyone flocks to. All they have to do is put the queen in a small cage, tie it around their necks and start pouring bees on their bodies. As soon as they smell her, honey bees begin to huddle around her. While they can manipulate how the bee beard is going to look, by placing Vaseline on its edges and keeping the bees contained to a certain area, wearing a bee beard isn’t the most pleasant sensation in the world. It definitely offers unique thrills, but having literally tens of thousands of bees clinging to your skin is pretty hard to bear. The bees closest to your skin grab on to it, while the others cling to the bees, but your skin ultimately supports all their weight. And then there are the stings. Bees look for moisture and in its absence, as time passes they get more and more irritated, which ultimately results in a few stings on the bee beard wearer’s face and neck. When it’s time to take of the living beard, the queen is removed and the wearer leans over the bees’ colony box and jumps. The jerking move forces them to let go of their skin.

PLEASE DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME, BEES CAN STING YOU!