Photo and Phobia

One of the things that keeps this career interesting is that photographers are put in different situations everyday. Some environments are easy to adapt to and others are more challenging.

With that in mind, my week started out photographing beekeeper Pat Imbimbo, owner of New England Farms in Granville. Pat is in the process of relocating some of his 90 honey bee colonies into new hive boxes and transporting some of them to nearby farms to help pollinate this year’s crops. Features writer Meg Hagerty is writing a profile of him for Monday’s paper, and since I live closest to Granville, I was assigned to get images for the story.

For the most part, this is a straightforward assignment. The difficult aspect for me is the fact that I am apiphobic. Anyone who really knows me can attest to the fact that my greatest fear in the world is bees. I’ve had this fear for as far back as I can remember. Unlike other irrational fears that I’ve dealt with, and have been mostly able to control, I haven’t quite been able to get over this one. Sharks, crocodiles and bears are no problem. Bees on the other hand send me running, jumping, or diving away as fast as I can move. But when our chief photographer Derek asked if I was allergic to bees, I had to admit that I didn’t think so. I’m just scared of them. So despite being very apprehensive, my week started off by donning a bee suit and stepping into a buzzing mass of honey bees.

Pat helped me into the suit and gave me a few basic instructions: Don’t swat, and if I run, you run. The experience was surprising. Though there were a few tentative minutes sweating and wondering if the bee suit would work. I was soon able to relax and focus on the task at hand. After about an hour of shooting and getting a close-up look at the bees’ behavior, I found that I didn’t want the shoot to end. From behind the mesh of the protective suit, the bees were fascinating and I had the fleeting thought that beekeeping would be a good way to get over my fear.

This job is unique in that as a photographer, you are thrust into all sorts of environments, and you are expected to work under all sorts of conditions. The experiences along the way; fun, exciting or challenging, I feel are some of the best perks of the job. Though I’m not, and may never be, over my fear of bees, I’m glad that I got to shoot the assignment and was able to have that experience.

Wow Jonny that sounds like a fascinating experience. I wonder if donning a bee suit would help me get over my phobia of bees and wasps. I've had the phobia all my life. I'm not sure why because I've only been stung twice and neither experience was terrifying since I didn't see them coming, the little buggers sneaked up on me. Since then I've learned that with all my allergies I have a good chance of going into anaphylactic shock the next time I'm stung, which doesn't help with the phobia. People make it worse by saying over and over, "Don't be afraid of it or it will sting you. Don't flinch like that, they're attracted to sudden movements and it will sting you." Don't you hate the smugness of these nonphobics! Yet these same people will absolutely freak out if I pick up a harmless garter snake and show it to them. I tell them to imagine a world filled with flying rattlesnakes. That's my life.

Hi Petalwing and welcome to oFear

Sounds more like a rational fear to me.
If you've got a predisposition to allergic reactions then having a fear of bee stings might be considered wholly normal!

Of course, you can be frightened of them but still control the way you react to them - tho isn't your reaction just a normal response to a health threatening situation?

petalwing - I'm with you on that! I've got a wasp phobia too. Had it all my life. People always ask if I've ever been stung and I say "Yeah, loads of times - my parents are both beekeepers." I'm not as afraid of bees, admittedly. This is because I'm not frightened of the pain of being stung, it's the aggression and bees are really docile. Now that I know this, I'm not really too bad in the early summer, just in the late summer when wasps get more aggressive because they've got nothing to lose!

I hate it when people act all smug as well - my dad's the worst, always going on about how he got bees stuck inside his beekeeping suit and how many times he got stung and so on. I wonder why he tells me all that stuff. Other people always think they know what's best for you and end up making you feel really stupid by saying things like "Oh, it's just a little wasp. You're much bigger than it is!"

Anyone else noticed that as soon as you mention your phobia, other people love to just come out with their horror stories?