Bee Gloves

Have you ever heard the saying: If life hands you lemons, you'd better hope it hands you sugar and water too or your lemonade is going to be awful? Or something like that. I forget.

Anywho, someone kindly gave me a pair of (gently) used welding gloves but there were a couple of problems. First, they're black. I'm not sure what the bees will think about that. We'll see.
Also, they are a men's size XL. My hands are most definitely not XL.

So I turned the gloves inside out and traced around my hand with a white pencil. I sewed along the line with my regular, hobby sewing machine and it did OK. Now they fit just right for my hands.
Then I cut a couple chunks out of some paint drop cloth I had laying around and sewed up some gauntlets to attach to the gloves.

They ended up being crazy-long. The gauntlets go all the way up to my armpits. I just pull the excess fabric of my jacket up and blouse it so there isn't a space for a bee to crawl inside and get crushed. I'll leave them that way for a while and see how they work before I decide if I should shorten them. I did accidentally punch myself in the mouth while I was trying to pull them up though. Seriously. You know...maybe I should cut them off; for my own safety.

Voila! Lemonade gloves. Cost of lemonade gloves: $0.

Update: I can't say if the black gloves are more bothersome to bees since I don't have any lighter colored gloves for comparison. I've used them a couple times now and noticed one bee had left a stinger in the gloves on both occasions. That doesn't seem too excessive to me so I'm going to call them a success.