Bee bearding
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Bee bearding is the practice of wearing several hundred thousand honey bees on one's face, usually as a sideshow-type activity.
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[edit] History of bee bearding
Though beekeepers since ancient times have allowed bees to rest on their bodies in order to demonstrate their rapport with the insects, the practice of congregating measurable quantities of bees on the face was initiated by Peter Prokopovitch, a Russian beekeeper, in the 1830s. The practice spread to various "freak" exhibitions at American carnivals by the end of the nineteenth century.
[edit] Bee-bearding records
The Guinness Book of Records includes a category for "most pounds of bees worn on the body," which is currently held by American animal trainer Mark Biancaniello. Biancaniello successfully wore 350,000 bees, weighing just over 87 pounds, during a 1998 broadcast of the Guinness World Records: Primetime television show. This broke the previous record, set in 1995 at the Cherry County Fair in northwestern Nebraska by Dren Rollins, a local tattoo parlor owner and "extreme sports" enthusiast who wore 81 pounds of bees. Rollins still holds the record for most pounds of bees worn by an "amateur"--any person who does not work with animals professionally and has minimal previous experience with bee bearding.
A 2005 attempt to break the record by Irish beekeeper Philip McCabe, who was to wear a full one hundred pounds of bees, failed when only 60 pounds of bees landed on his body.[1] McCabe was using Irish black bees, which are larger than Italian honey bees, so fewer bees (around 300,000) would have been required to reach 100 pounds than it took Biancaniello to reach 87 pounds. Bee bearding records are calculated by weight, not number of bees, because of this variation across honey bee strains.
Due to ever-increasing competition to break the record, most advanced attempts at bee bearding now involve bees covering the entire face, torso, back, and arms of the participant in order to provide sufficient surface area for over eighty pounds of bees to land. However, the name "bee bearding" is still used.
[edit] Bee bearding in popular culture
- In the 1992 The Simpsons episode New Kid on the Block, Abraham Simpson claims to have fruitlessly worn a fifteen pound beard of bees in order to impress the world's oldest woman.
- The episode Aptitude on the series The Suite Life of Zack and Cody shows Zack looking at a video called "Beard of Bees" on a YouTube-like website.
- In an episode of Friends, Joey plans a trip to Las Vegas, but asks Phoebe's advice on whether to take the north route or the south route. Phoebe claims that on the North Route, there's a man with a beard of bees.
- In the beginning of the King of the Hill episode "Mutual of OmAbwah", Dale Gribble wears a beard of bees while drinking beer in the alley with the rest of the guys.
