If you're not wearing appropriate protection then bees can kill you easy.
De minimis you need a) a smoker, b) a veil for your face, head, and neck, c) a long sleeve shirt and long pants both made of fabric they can't easily sting through, and d) preferably tall boots with the pants legs cinched over them so they can't sting your ankles. You need gloves too if you don't know what you're doing. That's if you're beekeeping, but if you're not and you happen upon a beehive you may be in serious trouble.
Bees fly faster than you can run. They fly farther than you can run when panicking from tens of stings. When they give chase they're committed to dying for the colony, so they will sting. So don't approach beehives if you're not prepped for it. Bees will warn you before they attack, unless they're already attacking someone else, in which case they'll just attack you without warning.
But if you’re careful you can go without PPE, and I have done so for years. The heat and discomfort of a suit and the additional crushed bees from clumsiness is not for me.
I don’t have Africanised bees, just nice suburban ones.
Normally the bees in the hives used to pollinate blueberries don’t give a damn about me while I’m out doing my agronomy job.
However I’ve found that when there are moving clouds that cause conditions to suddenly shift from shaded to full sun, the abrupt temperature/light increase seems to cause what I presume are guard bees to become upset, resulting in me suddenly getting stung. If the full sun condition is constant then no issues.
I definitely prefer the alfalfa leafcutting bee “hives”, used on alfalfa, they are so much more chill. Technically they are “solitary bees” but are gregarious and happy enough to form a sort of colony close together to others, which allows for having boxes of them. They lack both nest guarding instincts and a venomous stinger. Special bees are used for alfalfa because they don’t mind the alfalfa flowers mechanically slapping them with pollen in their face when opening the flowers. Regular honeybees don’t like that and will learn to chew through the base of the flower to get the nectar.
I would always wear a veil -- doesn't have to be a full suit. Heck, I'd never wear a full suit as that's a recipe for heat stroke here in Texas. But I have a very airy top-half only suit and that's OK. I also wear an ice pack vest during the hot Texas summer months.
And I would always have smoke except when there is a burn ban in effect. Smoke can make all the difference.
If you're allergic then one sting can kill you. If you're not allergic then 200 hundred stings can kill you. There can be a quarter million bees in a large colony.
Hundreds, even thousands of stings is a pretty common thing to happen to -for example- tree trimmers who find themselves disturbing a colony in the same tree.
Even if you're not allergic, a few stings in the wrong place can still kill you, e.g. if your entire neck swells up that it constricts your airways. If you get more than a couple stings to the face or neck I'd recommend you make a dash to the ER and chill out there for a while just in case.
