Laymond Hardy - Beekeeper and...

I met Laymond in 1973 through some mutual friends who were trying to track down the fabled Florida skunk ape, a sort of tropical version of the abominable snowman of the Himalyas. Supposedly there had been some sightings recently in the Port Charlotte area and they wanted to find out if it was for real or just an old Indian legend. In the Creek dialect spoken by the Seminole people the creature was called Iwashaki, which means "man who is not a man".

Laymond was along to lend scientific legitimacy to the search. He was a high school science teacher and had written a few articles for National Geographic. The rest of our crew consisted of a photographer (myself), a couple of jet airplane mechanics, and the owner of a gun shop. We did find what seemed like tracks in a few places, but nothing conclusive.

Laymond is the one who introduced me to Bobby Tiger and his family, who in turn introduced me to a bunch of other Miccosukee and Seminole Indians. He also raised a lot of strange and exotic tropical fruits and vegetables in his back yard, and he had at least half a dozen beehives. I was intrigued by the bees, and he invited me over to take some photos the next time he "robbed the hives" for honey.

I was expecting that we'd be wearing gloves and head nets but he assured me that his bees were used to being around people, and that "smoking" them would calm them even more. He stuffed his smoker with dried banana plant leaves, got them smoldering, and started blowing smoke into the first hive. You could hear the bees calm down as the incessant buzzing emanating from the hive got quieter and quieter.I was wearing a long sleeved shirt, but Laymond went about the task shirtless. An occasional bee would briefly land on our bare skin but neither one of us got stung during the hour or so we spent getting the honey out of the combs in the wooden frames that were inside the hives.

We tried to leave as much as possible of the wax honeycombs in the frames intact. We didn't need the wax, and Laymond said that the less that the bees had to rebuild, the faster they'd go back to collecting nectar from flowers and making more honey. I went home with 4 quart jars full of the best honey I've ever tasted, before or since. Like so many other people I've known over the years I lost track of Laymond. He was 54 when these photos were taken back in 1973, so it's likely he's no longer alive now.

The slides were shot with a Leica M4 and M2-R using 35 and 50mm Leitz Summicrons on Kodachrome II film.