To find out how many beads Niel started with, let's analyze the equation given:
\[ \frac{b}{8} + 25 = 500 \]
We can break this down step by step to identify the operations needed to solve it:
- Identify the operations:
- To isolate \( \frac{b}{8} \), we subtract 25 from both sides. This is a subtraction operation.
- Then, to solve for \( b \), we need to multiply both sides by 8. This is a multiplication operation.
Thus, the correct pair of operations used in this process is subtraction and multiplication.
So, the answer is:
subtraction and multiplication.