A billion bees in his bonnet

Writer Elaine Davie

This region of the country is sometimes referred to as the Land of Milk and Honey, justifiably, it would seem, at least as far as honey is concerned. Bee master, Gys Boonzaaier of Kleinmond has had an intimate relationship with bees for the past 55 years, so he should know, and with more than 600 of his hives spread across the Overberg, there is certainly no shortage of these busy little workers.

Gys’s love affair with bees started when he was a child living in Kleinmond. One day, his father, the Hermanus Chief Prosecutor, apparently quite randomly, announced that beekeeping sounded like a good hobby to pursue, not only for himself, but also for his daughter and three sons. This sudden proposal was greeted with minimum enthusiasm by most of the children, especially as it was likely to result in pain.

Nevertheless, under the tutelage of two local bee masters, the Condon brothers, they headed for the quarry just outside of town (now the Kleinmond golf course), where their first task was to capture a swarm of wild bees. As they suspected, by the time they arrived home, they all sported an array of painful bee stings.

Their mother was dragged into the enterprise with a request to come up with some kind of protection for their heads, which she did by the creative use of whatever materials she had to hand, including mosquito window netting. Eventually, only two of the brothers and their father persevered with the hobby, soaking up all they could learn from the Condon brothers, including making their own hives.

As Gys says, he couldn’t have had better mentors. He picked up a book on bee-keeping for the first time last year and found that he was able to learn nothing new, except the science behind the art. After school, Gys joined the police force and was posted to Johannesburg, but he hated the gut-wrenching violence he encountered every day and when his father fell ill, he gratefully returned to Kleinmond and the bees he had grown to love and respect. He bought the 50 or 60 hives his dad still maintained and set himself up for business (by that time all his siblings had dropped the imposed hobby).

He had already learnt how to capture bees from all kinds of sites: from old, abandoned hives, to holes in the mountain, to rubbish dumps and private properties; to divide the swarm if it was too large and transfer them to permanent hives somewhere in the fynbos. “I have never stopped learning from the bees,” he muses. “They are wonderful creatures. When I am feeling down, I head for my hives and afterwards I feel much better.

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