The Queen Catcher

I will make no attempt to draw life lessons from the life of bees, although infinite parallels do exist. I'll simply tell another story of how working with honey bees in Ethiopia has been a blast.

We've been trying to transfer wild bee colonies from a log hive hanging in a tree into a modern hive near the ground. Several times now we've attempted this transfer and a few times, it seemed to have worked, but then the bees left. They would stay for a few days, begin to build wax comb in the new hive, but after a week or so, they would swarm and find a new place to live. After each of these attempts, we made improvements to the modern hive and fixed some things that my have caused them to swarm, but I knew the most crucial step was neglected. We never found and trapped the queen bee. If the queen bee is caught, then the colony will stay.

This last time we enlisted the help of a mysterious man known as the "queen catcher". I say he's mysterious because, no one seemed to know his full name, or where he lived, or how he got his expertise. No one even knew when exactly he would show up to help us find the queen. Twice we all gathered at the site after dark (because this is when the bees are sleeping). We waited only to decide that the mysterious "queen catcher" was not showing. The night that he came, he proved his skills. In the middle of a swarm 20,000 strong, he caught the queen bee without injuring her and placed her in a queen cage. He did this three nights, each time with perfection, each time with no gloves, no veil, working by flashlight. Even though I don't know his name, I still stand in awe of the mysterious queen catcher.