Note to Self. Always remember to zip up your bee suit before opening a hive.

The hot weather has turned our hives into hordes of raging six-legged, winged savages bent on violence. You can hear them before you see them, buzzing clouds flying in and out, while entry to the hive is guarded by an angry clump of defenders. As dusk falls, the ranks of sentries expands to form a humming, fluttering doorway of wings and stripes, keeping robbers out, and the temperature level.

It’s a well-oiled magnificent machine, and one that doesn’t suffer fools in bee suits gladly. Therefore try to imagine if you will, the outrage of these colonies, at having their worlds disturbed by humans. Homes opened and honey plundered. It doesn’t go down well.

Since keeping bees I’ve got better at being calm around swarms of them boiling around me. If they’re not going for my face, that’s OK. Mostly they’re going about their business if I take deep breaths and look closely. When it’s a face-job, I’ll walk around the garden for a bit and then come back. Bite sized chunks of whatever I’m doing, but preferably not chunks out of me.

Until last weekend. It was hot and we’d been extracting for what felt like hours. Tiring, sweaty, thankless work with the bees apoplectic. As afternoon morphed into evening, my thoughts turned to a cold cider and the Antiques Roadshow. The end was in sight, all I had to do was return the frames to their rightful owners, close up and take a well-earned break. I hurried across to the last hive and opened it up.

It took me a few seconds for the penny to drop that there were bees in my veil. But drop it did, with a sickening thud (as my old mum would have said). The golden rule of having bees breach your suit – stay calm. Reader I failed. I ran shrieking down the garden, swatting at the bees on my face until I reached the kitchen and my husband, with pinpoint accuracy, plucked the stings from my lip and the corner of my eye.

I got my cider. I also ended up looking like a Love Island contestant with botched lip filler within half an hour as the sting under my lower lip worked its magic. My eye socket was agony and by morning, the entire left side of my face had swollen up, and I couldn’t open my left eye at all.

It took three days for my face to return to a normal shape. Thank heavens for Germolene, which went on the second after the stings had come out, and antihistamines. And last but far from least, for my husband, who heroically finished all the honey extraction and put the hives back together.

Suffice to say that’s one rookie error I shall not be making again.