Acupuncturist, Rose does not charge patients for bee venom therapy itself but for counseling, acupuncture and advice. Rose teaches people how to administer the bee stings themselves. 
     Bee sting therapy is fatal to the honeybees. The stinger is attached to the female bees' intestines and the bee dies within a few days after they have stung a patient.  "I don't feel happy about the fact that bees die," says Rose, bees in an empty cream cheese container after they sting patients. "I always thank the bee. It's a very sacred act."  Bee sting therapy involves holding a live bee in tweezers next to the skin. The bee's stinger comes out and stays in the skin, pumping bee venom. The stinger is removed later.  Of course the therapy is rather painful for patients, at least at first.  Tami Smith describes the feeling as an acid burn, similar to the pain of a fire ant bite.
     Amber Rose collects the bees in empty plastic jars with a bit of honeycomb inside, along with some water and part of the cardboard core of a bathroom tissue roll. The bees normally become docile after sating themselves on the honey.  If not, Rose will spray them with a bit of water before lifting them out with a pair of tweezers..
     "Are you ready, Jack?" she asks, holding a bee an inch away from Smith's back on a recent Tuesday afternoon. "Yep," he replies,   "Hmmm, this one might be a dud," she says, while rubbing the end of the bee against   Smith's exposed back. "Oh, there we go."
Once the stinger, which looks like a small sliver, is embedded in Smith's skin, a tiny sac at the top pulsates, injecting about 90 percent of its venom within 20 seconds.
     Rose stings people at acupuncture points with mystical names like "The Gate of Life"and "The Mother within us that Never Dies."    For the Smiths, who have not found antibiotics to be as effective in combating the symptoms of Lyme disease, bee sting therapy seems a godsend. "When you finally have a good day, it feels like you're high on drugs," says Jack Smith, who runs his own window blind business. "You're high on life."
"These types of treatments are really helpful for people like us," his wife says, "You could go into a pain clinic and they'd probably give you some Oxycontin, but if I do that I might as well quit."
Rose says, "If I could wave a magic wand there'd be a beehive on every block."

Amber Rose is a acupuncturist, psychotherapist, and author of two outstanding books about Classical Acupuncture and Bee Acupuncture:  Penetrating Heaven and  Bee in Balance.  Both available in E-Book format.