An extreme sport

On 1st April 2022, at precisely 8.47 in the morning, I stood in front of the entrance to MakoLab and ding-ding-ding-ding… the first obstacle! My badge didn’t open the door. “Oh, well,” I thought, “it is April Fools’ Day. These MakoLabbers are a bunch of pranksters and they’re off to a good start!”

Phew! So we managed to undo the unopening door spell! In the note you wrote about yourself for the newsletter, you listed a fair few interests! One of them is apiculture, which is interesting enough in itself, but you also avered that, in your case, it’s an extreme sport on account of your allergy to bee stings! Where did you get the idea of taking it up as a hobby?

Bees have been in our family as far back as I can remember. By the time I was five or six, I was involved in harvesting honey. In those days, all we had was a timeworn, hand-operated honey extractor and the whole process was quite time-consuming, so it was all hands to the pump, with every bit of help worth its weight in gold. To me, it was great fun… right up to the moment when I was seriously stung by several of those fluffy little winged animals at once. The concentration of venom was evidently so great that my allergy made its presence known and I wound up in hospital, swollen up like a balloon and with symptoms of anaphylactic shock… and that’s when I knew that this was my ‘extreme sport’.

Yes. In my childhood, beekeeping wound its way in. It began with my grandfather. In the beginning, it was only him and my uncle who worked with the bees. But because they used to ride out to them on grandad’s moped, as a kid I was always whinging for him to take me with him, even though he could hardly tell my uncle to stay at home! Later on, when he died, he passed the apiary on to my uncle and me.
There wasn’t much to attract a kid in the final year of middle school. It meant cycling several kilometres to look after some bees once school was over for the day, not to mention giving up weekends to keep an eye on them and doing the weekly chores. It was downright irritating, because my friends were playing basketball or on the ‘puter. In spite of that, with time, it transformed into a passion, to the extent that I wanted to study apiculture at technical school.
Later on came a period when I didn’t have so much time… I was at uni. I can say, though, that, with the exception of a few short breaks, I’ve been involved in it throughout my life.

Hmm. It’s not some kind of secret knowledge. Mainly from the information handed on to me by my grandad… and that was a really solid foundation. Later on, I started looking for different kinds of trade fairs, where there were loads of interesting talks and panel discussions which were excellent for the exchange of know-how. I could also get my hands on fascinating literature in the field. So there really are plenty of sources for people who want to learn.

[He laughs] The amount of honey in a given year depends very much on the weather. That means we don’t always have ‘wholesale’ quantities, although we always earmark some of it for sale. However, the sugar we give the bees to feed on in exchange is fairly expensive in the quantities we need. So you can always ask at around the time of the first honey harvest, when the fields of rapeseed are yellow and gorgeous and the latest buzz on Instagram!

We’ll be first in the queue, no doubt about it! Thank you, Grzegorz , for taking us into your sweet-scented, busily humming world.

Translated from the Polish by Caryl Swift