An Interview with the Beekeeper Who Doesn't Wear a Veil
On trust, stillness, and forty years without a serious sting.
He works his hives bare-handed and bare-faced, and insists the veil is less protective than the stillness it usually replaces.
He has kept bees for forty-one years and has not worn a veil in at least thirty of them, a fact he shares not as a boast but as a genuine piece of advice he wishes more beginners would take seriously.
The veil, he argues, makes people careless, because it makes them feel safe enough to move quickly. Without it, you move the way the bees actually need you to move, which is slowly, and with real attention.
He has been stung, of course, more times than he can count. What he has not been, not once in three decades, is stung out of the kind of panic a veil quietly encourages.
