With Halloween around the corner, I've been thinking about costumes a bit, and it occurred to me that I should just dress up as a beekeeper. It's an easy costume, especially when you consider I took up beekeeping this year as a new hobby. I've spent all summer monitoring and tending to the new hive, making sure the colony is healthy, the queen is laying eggs, and that the workers have built up enough of a honey store to get them through their first Minnesota winter.

For the most part, beekeeping is an exercise in patience and optimization. The bees know what they are doing, and they'll happily go on doing it without you. Making honey and raising a brood is what they do. It's their job.

In order to make enough honey to have a surplus that you can safely steal from them in the fall, the bees have to work a little harder and a little more efficiently than they do naturally. You spend most of your time trying to optimize the physical layout of their home. You do this by preventing swarms, periodically rearranging the comb in the hive, and adding more hive bodies when the bees need room to grow. This is the optimization part.

The patience part is also all about the bees doing their job. Bees in a healthy, proud hive will protect the colony and their honey store to the death. They seem to instinctively know when the winter is coming and a colony of friendly, gentle bees will begin to bristle with aggressive sentries that crowd all of the hive's openings. It's as if they are expecting some giant ape in a funny suit to bust up their party and nick the fruits of their hard summer labor. I don't know where they get this crazy notion, but it means you have to be extra patient in the fall, moving particularly slow and methodical so as not to rile up the bees and trigger the hive's defense mechanism.

As you might imagine, no matter how patient and careful you are, when you work with bees you get stung from time to time. It's a drag, and it stings a little, but the pain goes away quickly and it doesn't swell or itch as much as a wasp sting or a horsefly bite.

I don't hold it against the bees. Unlike the mosquito or horsefly, it's _me_ who is interrupting _their_ space. When you get stung, it's because the bees are healthy, vigorous, and doing their best work, protecting their investment.

So I was a little too brash yesterday when I was working the hive, and a haughty little bee flew over to my hand and told me straight up what she thought of my activities. I carefully removed the stinger, trying not to alarm the rest of the hive, finished up my work, and then went inside to clean my hand. It throbbed for a little bit and left a little bump, but it wasn't any worse than the flu and tetanus shots I received from my doctor a week ago.

Overnight, though, something magical happened to my hand, and when I awoke, I discovered that from the elbow down, my little bee sting had somehow transmogrified into Popeye's right arm.

Bear in mind that I've been a lightweight all my life. So, the sudden immensity of my hand and forearm, while concerning, was also kind of impressive. My fist looked like a massive bludgeon. I could barely get the fingers of my other hand to wrap around the beefy hugeness of my new wrist.

After the initial novelty wore off, I decided to play it safe. From the freezer, I grabbed a brick of frozen spinach and tried to reduce the swelling a little before I left for work.

The strangest thing then happened.

Throughout the day, I could feel my arm growing, my pulse trobbing through my hand, feeding nutrients and energy to the rapidly expanding flesh. During a team meeting, I caught some of my coworkers actually watching my arm grow right before their eyes. I could tell they were secretly jealous.

By the end of the day, though, my skin had been stretched so thin and taught over the entirety of my arm that I started to develop little sausage folds around my fingers and wrist. I swear that if you listened carefully, you could hear that familiar sound of balloons rubbing together when I tried to bend my fingers.

So this is the point in the story where you're probably calling bullshit. I'm exaggerating, right? Well, take a peek at this skull thump of a fist.

Pretty sweet, yeah?

My hand is like a hot raging hellfire of a bowling ball with some stubby pepperoni fingers and an opposable kielbasa.

At the point of this photo, it was all red and pulsing and maybe it was the Benadryl, but I swear it was trying to communicate with me. Trying to tell me to do things. Punch through walls. Crush baseballs. Feats of strength and such that only the most capable of Popeye appendage can effect.

I figured that this was all probably too good to be true, so before attempting to find another magic bee to pump up my left side, I took a trip to the doctor's office. The woman at the desk couldn't help but gaze in fascination as my giant hand-hock enclosed the #2 pencil and delicately filled out insurance forms.

The unexpected part comes when the doctor looks things over and dertermines that I have no bee sting allergy. The sad truth, however, is that somehow that little bee sting left me breifly exposed to some mean-ass Popeye pathogen. As near as I can tell, sometime last night that little ember of a skin infection became sentient and has taken over my arm.

She orders an antibiotic IV drip to combat the infection, but I find her talking to my hand instead of my face. I'm pretty sure she can hear it as well, but I can't quite make out what it's saying to her. She compliments it, telling the hulkian man paw that it's really an impressive case and that it should come back to visit again tomorrow. I know it's speaking to her, and I even catch the nurse hesitate with the IV. Fearful. Choosing to prick the vein in my left arm, almost in some sort of compromise with the angry, confident mass of telepathic tissue.

I know it's a betrayal, but I think I'll go back tomorrow, if for no other reason than to give the doctor another chance to discuss things with my arm and reconsider her decision about handling my recent Popeyeism.

Depending on the doctor's final diagnosis, on Halloween I'll be dressed up as a dude in a silly veil hat, or as an anchor-tatted sailor with over-sized forearms. In either case, the costume should be easy to put together, and I owe it all to my little honey bees.