Four beers, one ladder, 8000 bees and an Irishman.
What could go wrong?
Or so thought 38-year-old Irish expatriate Andrew Short.
Right up until the moment he realised he was up a ladder, halfway to his roof, in the middle of the night, carrying a beehive, with 60 bees crawling inside his beekeeper's suit.
And then they started stinging.
"A few beers maybe and a ladder, it's a bad combination," Mr Short told reporters.
It was just after midnight on Tuesday when Mr Short came home from the Melbourne Comedy Festival, with a few beers under his belt.
Buoyed by Dutch courage, he thought the time was right to tackle the hive of about 8000 bees that had settled in his Flemington backyard and move it to his rooftop.
The recently registered amateur beekeeper donned his suit and set to work.
All was going well, he said, until he noticed some bees crawling across his veil.
"I was going, 'How did they get out? Maybe they just came home late, because bees come home late too' ...
"And then I realised, he's not on the outside, he's on the inside of my veil."
It was then that he bumped the hive and "all the bees escaped", with about 60 invading his suit.
"But the only problem was, I was up the ladder holding the hive, so the job wasn't done yet, and at that point it was easier to go up than go down.
"So they were there stinging my eyes but I had to carry on to try and make sure that I wasn't going to fall off the roof any more, so there was a little bit of work to do, and then I said 'best to go down'."
At first he wasn't sure they were stinging him.
"There was a stinging sensation but I was going like, 'Is that a bee sting? Surely it's worse than that.' So I wasn't sure if they stung me, but after a while you figure it out, you know, after about 20."
Back inside, he called an ambulance and arrived at Footscray's Western Hospital with about 60 bee stings to his upper body, face, neck, arms and chest but in a stable condition.
His main worry was being too scared to call his wife, who was away for a few nights with their two young daughters.
"She was away, so I thought it was the perfect night to do it, because you can't ask the missus to get involved in lifting beehives, oddly."
Emergency department director Michael Bryant said the main danger Mr Short had faced probably was falling off the ladder.
Inspired by a centuries-old Parisian beekeeping culture, Mr Short is undeterred by his near-disastrous brush with the bees.
"In the high buildings in Paris, you know, how do the guys get away from the missus for a couple of hours? They go up on to the roof and look at the bees," he laughed.
"But there's no big beekeeping culture in Melbourne. It's starting, though, so we'll see how that goes."
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