The farmer and former owner of our new farm, James Klanderman, offered to teach my father how to care for the bees in the Spring, once the snow melted. Mr. Klanderman said that compared with other creatures on the farm, bees did not require a lot of daily work, like feeding or mucking out stalls. But he did say that bees were wild, and this meant that they were sometimes a challenge to work with. He added that you had to work with them and cooperate with them, and not try to domesticate or dominate them. This was one concept that my father never seemed to grasp, and he got stung often.
When Mr. Klanderman came back to the farm in the Spring, he provided two essential things to care for bees – the smoker, and the head veil for protection from bee stings.
Another thing Mr. Klanderman warned my father about was the danger of swarming. This often happened when the hive was getting crowded and the queen and a large number of the hive would leave the hive and look for a new home. The bees would swarm around the queen temporarily on a nearby branch of a tree.
My brother Milt and I were often warned not to play in the area of the beehives. One day we decided to check on a beehive to see what was going on inside. I lifted up the cover and we were immediately attacked by angry bees. I started running but my two-year-old brother didn’t move fast enough. By the time he got back to the house he had been stung 30 times! My mother called the doctor for advice, and as it turned out he was fine.
My father sold some honey to the neighbors for a few years, and we had some for our own family’s use. But he never enjoyed working with the bees. One day, not too many years after my father started keeping bees, someone asked him if he ever thought about selling his hives, and he eventually did sell them. It was the end of his beekeeping business in Borculo.