“Every time I see that smoker,” said the doctor,
“I think of your Dad…”
A Recollection of Arch Hockensmith, Beekeeper
Wes Henry
Arch Hockensmith, as a lot of folks do, wore many hats. He was a friend, a neighbor and fellow church-member to name a few; particularly to my father, but Arch was also a beekeeper, the only one I think I ever knew from my youth and growing up in Franklin County.
I was younger mind you, yet I recall that his hair was slicked back and jet-black as the horn-rimmed glasses that framed his eyes, and he spoke his Kentucky-ease quick-staccato-like- and in a high tone past thin lips. I don’t know if it’s true of folks like Arch, the fact that if you tied their hands they couldn’t talk, but he told his stories with unfettered animation, and it made for some good ones.
Ruby, she never left his side all of those avowed-years and cooked a time or two for my father during a divorced and single time of his life. He told me of Arch going and robbing a hive of a queen bee in a cool time of the year, Spring maybe, and that after how it had warmed up in the car it crawled up his leg and stung him on the way home. Through the laughing of others’ round about, I heard of and saw descriptions of his thrashing and hollering in the passenger seat. Lots of storytellers act their words out around here.
Knowing a thing or two of beekeeping, now that I’m all grown up and a beekeep’ myself, something just doesn’t seem completely accurate about that tale, but… I leave it alone, as we should a lot of things, for goodness sakes. I find myself often wanting to smell the cigarette smoke and hear and see the gaiety of those souls long passed, much of which took place on the porch of the church, nestled in the half-light of a hollow along the high limestone banks of a branch for which it was named – Camp Pleasant.
It’s been more than twenty years since the bees were to be “told” of Arch’s passing, and in a recent conversation with his daughter I confirmed what I had not thought of it for quite some time.
“Didn’t your Dad keep bees?” I wrote, asking in response to a comment on a particular social media post.
“Yes, he had hives all over,” replied Teresa. “He had some in Bald Knob, Gregory Woods and Georgetown. He loved his bees.”
I sensed her enthusiasm to tell me more as she added to her recollection with a story worth sharing, again, a story that easily illustrates that beekeeping is more than just honey, and that Arch apparently knew that too.
Understand, as most mortals, the ills of age caught up with Arch and he suffered sore joints with arthritis. And though he may not have known to call it so, apitherapy was apparently real and a great help to Arch’s ails.
“If his hands or his knees would start hurting,” she recounted, “he would take the protective gear off and let them sting him and by the next afternoon he could move his hands and knees without any pain.”
Of course, not all physicians chalked it up to the bee venom. However, the story she recounted didn’t stop there, but continued with Arch’s attempt to convince the medical community, bearing the burden of proof in himself.
She kept with the details in that “He had a heart doctor that was a friend of his and said ‘that was crazy.’”
The doctor had apparently agreed to a wager of sorts and to go along to see for himself. Seeing is believing for a lot of people – for those of little faith, I suppose.
She recalled that, “One day I drove him and Daddy over to a couple of his hives and Daddy could hardly move his hands, they hurt and were so swollen. He said he made the bees mad so they would sting him. I’m not sure about making them mad, but they did sting him.”
More acute applications would pinpoint the stinging to a precise spot. However, in her description I envisioned and made the claim that Arch used a “shotgun approach” to it, much as we fellow-keeps endure, unsolicited of course, when we might drop a frame or having had a top deep fall over and spill out all its contents when it was set on its side for just a moment to inspect the lower chamber. Ask me how I know.
“The next day I took Daddy by the doctor’s office,” she said of the results. “The doctor came out and Daddy started moving his fingers and hands up and down and started to dance across the room!”
Knowing Arch and his jovial ways, I can see it in my own mind’s eye and hear him in the ears too. I laughed when I first read of it and still do even as I write.
“The look on the doctor’s face was so funny,” she continued. “He confessed, ‘You really are feeling better. You could barely walk yesterday and couldn’t move your hands.’”
“I told you,” said Arch, “when this happens, I let the bees sting me.”
The emotion leapt from her last sentences, “When Daddy passed away I took one of the smokers he used but had refinished and gave it to the doctor. He said, ‘If I had not seen with my own eyes – the bees stinging him and he couldn’t move, then could, I would not have believed it. I will never forget that.’”
With a believing nod and a smile I read her last words, “Every time I see bee hives, I always think of Daddy doing that.”
As quickly as shadows fade so our lives are but for a moment, and what is left are the smiles at the thoughts of our memories.
