I remember watching one of these shows (I think Survivorman or whatever) and he made a fire in Alaska then went to sleep right next to it. In all my wilderness training, I was told that it's a tremendously bad idea to do that because your body's heat regulation will turn itself off very quickly while being exposed to an exterior source of heat but once the heat is gone it takes a relatively long time to pick back up again. This, I was told, was a very common cause of hypothermia--people spend too much time around a fire and when they have to leave it their bodies are far more vulnerable than usual to the cold.
I do wonder how accurate that is, though. I mean, yeah, I have personal anecdotal evidence that if you spend half an hour around a fire and then walk away from it, all of a sudden the same temperature feels much much colder than it did earlier. I can see that being justified more by the way the body interprets the senses, however, than an actual reflection of metabolic processes. Anybody know?
Oh, and without having seen the episode with the bees, I hope this jackass didn't neglect to mention that the proper way to get honey is to build a fire underneath or near the hive with lots of wet fuel so as to smoke out the bees. In a survival situation, the risk of getting stung is a far greater concern than the calorie value of the honey itself.
Hybrid Mode
