80 Years Among the Bees, Beekeeper, Teacher, Researcher, Inventor, and Professional Bee Wrangler, Part 1
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Photo courtesy of Norman Gary.
By: Ross Conrad
About one month before his 93rd birthday I had the distinct privilege of interviewing Dr. Norman Gary. At about one and a half hours, it is the longest interview I have ever conducted for Bee Culture Magazine. I recorded so much great material that I have broken the interview up into two parts. Here in part 1, Norman takes us behind the scenes in Hollywood and shares some of the secrets and tricks he used to get bees to perform on cue for the camera as well as a couple of his most harrowing bee wrangling experiences.
Even if you are not already familiar with him, you likely have seen his work. He was responsible for the bee action in many of the movies that featured honey bees between 1973 and 2001. Born Norman Erwin Gary in Ocala, Florida on November 1, 1933, as Norman tells it, he accidentally fell in love with bees early on. “As a boy I was out walking with my dog in a wooded area nearby. My dog jumped a rabbit and chased it away. I sat down to rest on a log and I looked over and there was a dead tree with a hole in it and something was flying in and out of it. That was my introduction to bees. I got curious about them and wrote to the University of Florida for information and ended up getting hooked on them at age 13 and I’ve been with them ever since.”
Norman’s introduction to training bees for theatrical and cinematic productions began with a scene in the 1973 Sci-Fi movie, Invasion of the Bee Girls. As Norman explains, this would set him up for much more challenging work later. “One day I got a phone call at the office and a film producer was going to produce a movie that featured bees not just in a scene here and there, but in the entire movie from beginning to end. The name of the movie was The Savage Bees and the filming of it happened mostly in New Orleans. I took vacation from university work for a month and spent the whole time doing this entire film. Ken Lorenzen was my research technician during most of my research career at UC Davis. I invited him to assist with the bee work during the filming of Savage Bees. One scene involved a simulated attack of a large number of bees on an actor. We used Ken since he was experienced with bees and we didn’t want to risk a famous actor.”
Besides, acting as honey bee trainer, technical director, stunt man and wrangler of the bees for The Savage Bees, Norman got his first acting role in that film. “I got my screen actors guild credentials based on my acting in that film. During my performance there was only one word in the script for me to yell out…“HELP!”. I played the role of a tractor driver who was attacked by thousands of these bees. I was on the tractor and there were bees clustered in a tree above me. Someone remotely pulled a wire and caused all the bees to fly all around me and the tractor. I jumped off the tractor and ran and jumped into a nearby pond to try to escape them. That was the action. We filmed the scene three times. The first time when I jumped off the tractor, I was kind of screaming and making noise and I inhaled a bee. It stung me inside my throat and I thought I was in real trouble. But it only swelled slightly and I was able to finish the scene and after a little rest I did the scene twice more.”
When I asked Norman if his work ever made it into the blooper reels, he set me straight. “It was always pretty serious work from my vantage point. Safety was always my first concern during a lifetime of bee wrangling adventures for movies and TV shows. In shooting The Savage Bees there were two big challenges. My first job was to cover an entire car exterior with an inch or two of bees. Not only did we have to cover it for the scene, but we had to drive it down the main street of New Orleans to the Superdome. We got the tourists out of there and replaced them with artificial tourists. The strategy in theatrical terms for the movie was to lower the temperature in the Superdome to freeze the bees to death. We parked the car on the 50-yard line. To simulate the freezing and the bees falling off the windshield, I stood on the top of the car and dribbled dead bees over the windshield. The sequel was called Terror Out Of The Sky. In that movie, they really challenged me. The most challenging scene in my life involved a school bus actually filled with a bunch of kids. In the movie the bees attack the bus, and I had to cover the entire bus with an inch or two of bees for the scene.”
I asked Norman how he managed to cover an entire school bus with bees. “I used a very attractive liquid pheromone. I would put the tiniest drops you could imagine here and there on the surface of any object that I wanted the bees to cluster on. Then I would release the bees that had been clustered as a swarm overnight. After putting the pheromone droplets on the target, person, or whatever, I would bring over the bees clustered in their little screen carrier and then scoop up the bees with a little miniature dustpan and shake them to make them fly. I’d be sure I was downwind from the target so they would smell the pheromone and go and cluster on it. I did this many, many times with many actors. And if the director wanted the bees to be flying all around the person, I would stand over to one side and toss dustpan loads of bees that would then fly around the target and then I’d quickly jump out of the frame and they would shoot the action with the bees flying around the person.
“Anyway, the whole school bus needed to be covered and I think what I did was I just covered one side of the bus at a time to make it appear fully covered. Also, in the movie a guy was to be lowered by helicopter on a rope to try to attract all the bees away from the vehicle and onto him and then have him fly away covered with bees to a nearby building that connected to an abandoned sewer line that you could walk into to release and trap them. During the prep there, the helicopter was circling the sewage plant while the guy was up there covered in bees. Unknown to us he was choking to death on his protective suit and almost collapsed up in the sky before they could get him down. I’ll never forget how close we came to killing him!”
So how many hives does it take to cover an entire school bus with bees I asked. “I can’t tell you that. All I can tell you is that in my productions, I would buy or rent caged bees from a professional packaged bee producer near Sacramento. Many times, I would have 15 or 20 two- or three-pound packages. I would remove all of the bees from the cages the night before the shoot and cluster them into a giant swarm hanging about six feet above ground level. This would allow them to develop swarming behavior in preparation for filming the next day.”
I wondered if Norman was still doing any movie work. “I am retired now but up to about a year ago I was getting calls. The last call I acted on, I decided to thank the guy who supplied the packaged bees all those years by helping him become the bee trainer and wrangler. I taught him how to do it and actually attended this one-day shoot with him.”
When I suggested that this person was being groomed to take over and replace Norman as a cinematic bee wrangler, he corrected me. “Now they are able to create bees artificially that look pretty realistic through computer-generated imagery. I think trained bees are no longer needed unless something very special is being done. Besides, I think I am the only person who knows the chemical formula for the attractive pheromone solution that I use. I will tell you that it does contain queen substance. I still have some in my fridge but I’ve quit doing bee behavior work for films.”
Ultimately Norman performed in and/or wrangled bees for some 67 television shows and 18 movies. I asked Norman about his television appearances. “There were two main TV shows that I did. One that I appeared on four times was called, That’s Incredible. It ran for several years and was so successful that they started another one called Those Amazing Animals. I appeared in that program only once. It starred Jim Stafford (famous for his hit song Spiders and Snakes), Priscilla Presley (Elvis’ wife), and Burgess Meredith (who played the Penguin in the 1960’s Batman TV series). In fact Burgess and I became good friends. I persuaded him to try beekeeping and taught him. He did very well for about two years, but one Spring they swarmed and clustered next door at his neighbor’s – another movie star’s home, and they weren’t happy! So Burgess gave up beekeeping even though he really loved the bees.
“The other totally exciting career I’ve had is with music. I’ve been a professional musician for over 70 years. I play clarinet, alto and tenor sax and flute. I’ve had many bands and been in many combos, but probably the high point was when I performed for the largest Jazz festival in California, the Sacramento Jazz Festival. I performed in that festival for 31 consecutive years. For seven years I had my own band, Beez Kneez jazz band and we released two professional CD recordings.”
When Norman combined his passion for bees with his passion for music, he reached new heights. “Back in 1991 the Orange County Fair near Los Angeles decided to feature honey bees. They hired me to go down and work for almost a month developing TV performances and shows that they thought the public would appreciate. In one, I developed a bee show where I gave a little bee lecture on a small open stage outside before an audience of about 7,000 people. At the end of my little show, I would go inside a little air-conditioned chamber and cover myself with 100,000 bees and then play some jazz clarinet. I did this every day for I think it was 16 days.
“Due to the publicity this received I got picked up by Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and four or five years later, I repeated the same show for Jay Leno who had taken over from Johnny Carson. Ultimately, I really did more educating of the general public about bees and beekeeping than I think anyone because with every show I did, I did my best to squeeze in a couple hard facts, important ones like honey bees are responsible for one third of our food supply. I’ve reached millions and millions of people over the years.”
Norman regularly used his intimate knowledge of bee behavior to conduct feats that would astound the public. For example, he created, organized, and successfully conducted record-breaking attempts for 3 Guinness World Records. The first attempt was with a beauty queen in Australia who needed publicity so she asked him to cover her with bees in an attempt to break the Guinness record.
In his second world record breaking event he created a living bee suit by clustering more than 87 pounds of bees on a friend. Given that a 3-pound package holds about 9,000 bees, that’s over 250,000 bees!
As Norman tells it his third and final Guinness World Record attempt exceeded even his expectations. “In my last successful Guinness Record stunt, I trained hundreds of bees from a nearby hive to forage for artificial nectar on a sponge soaked with sugar syrup flavored with anise. Then I hid the sponge in a plastic bag. Hundreds of bees began “sniffing” the area, searching for the artificial nectar. I quickly sat in a nearby chair and placed a small sponge with the training scent inside my mouth. Then I opened my mouth and gently exhaled the scented ‘nectar’. The excited bees quickly homed in on the scent. Within a few seconds they entered and filled my open mouth so full that it was very difficult to bring my lips together to completely close my mouth for the ten seconds as required by the Guinness rules.
“To get an accurate count of the bees I placed a cylindrical, wire mesh cage to my lips, opened my mouth and released all of the bees into the cage. My mouth was empty within a few seconds! Then I quickly closed the cage entrance and allowed them to escape, one by one, through a small opening at the opposite end of the cage so they could be accurately counted. We counted 109 bees! It was amazing…didn’t know my mouth was so BIG!! I received no stings during the stunt.”
Next month in part 2 of my interview with Dr. Norman Gary, we will cover his extensive career as an apicultural teacher, honey bee researcher and inventor.