This is the sixteenth edition of JTPL Stories: a series of interviews with library patrons, staff, and partners. Continue below to meet the faces of JTPL with our Outreach Coordinator, Aliya! Click Here to read the entire series.
“I’m a bit of a geek,” Wayne Hunsucker told me as he explained complex honeybee genetics during our interview. “I’ve had many things that fascinated me in life, but I’m still very, very deep in the rabbit hole with bees… I couldn’t stay out of them.”
43 years ago, a friend in Florida introduced Wayne to bees for the first time.
“He took me out to his backyard and handed me a frame of bees out of a hive,” Wayne said. “It was a gorgeous day as I remember, and he almost immediately began telling me what I was looking at. There’s a plethora of things you can talk about on the face of just one frame.”
Wayne continued, “I’ve never been the same. I was marked and stunned. I went to the library that Monday – it was on a Sunday afternoon – and got everything I could find on bees and started reading.”
Through many jobs and moves in the decades since, Wayne has continually kept at least one hive.
“I’m blessed… I’ve got my family, a chicken thawing in the sink for dinner, and honeybees. That’s literally all I need.”
Today, he tends his own apiary just outside of Louisville with his youngest son and one of his grandsons. They both showed an interest in bees from a young age, and they’ve grown to be bee nerds just like Wayne. He told me his son will occasionally text him at 2 or 3 a.m. with an idea for their hives or a new tip he’s learned.
Despite health issues, Wayne stays involved with his bees daily. Recently, he visited our Clarksville location to talk about bee life cycles and their roles in our neighborhoods. He doesn’t call himself an educator. But Wayne clearly enjoys getting others involved in his work.
Beekeeping is all about learning and problem solving, and he says there is always more to dive into.
“In fact, I was just reading an article that I must have read seven or eight times over the winter. It’s about the way we’re going to be raising our own queens this season.” He went on to explain the intricate process he’ll soon go through to produce the perfect queens for his hives.
It can be overwhelming to keep up with everything going on in the bee world. “If you talk to 10 beekeepers about a question, you’ll get 15 different opinions,” Wayne told me. Rather than getting involved in arguments or trending disagreements, he focuses on a few topics that interest him the most.
Right now, those are raising queens and combating an invasive species of hornets that pose a major threat to U.S. bee populations. Wayne has helped organize a local group that is setting up traps and early warning systems to catch the hornets in Kentuckiana before they create too much damage.
“I’m blessed,” Wayne told me in our interview. “I’ve got my family, a chicken thawing in the sink for dinner, and honeybees. That’s literally all I need.”
It certainly sounds like an idyllic life.
“Somebody said that aging is a series of losses, and it’s the truth. But I think, if you’re paying attention, that you gain an awful lot of sovereignty… Much of the things that have been jettisoned from my life I didn’t need,” Wayne said. “It was getting in the way.”
“I’m in a position that I don’t have to do anything but make dinner and take care of my bees,” Wayne said. “I’m living my best life.”