Riaan Boucher rarely wears gloves or a protective suit when on the job. I marvel as he reaches for a rooftop comb with his bare hands while a cigarette rests comfortably between his lips. Boucher is completely at home in a hive.
Riaan Boucher rarely wears gloves or a protective suit when on the job. I marvel as he reaches for a rooftop comb with his bare hands while a cigarette rests comfortably between his lips. Boucher is completely at home in a hive.
At only nine years old, this Grahamstown local began keeping bees. “My father and my grandfather always had hives, I watched how they did it,” said Boucher.
It didn’t take long to train himself in the business of bees. At 11, Boucher began doing regular bee removals and charging clients. Now, at 19, removing hives is Boucher’s full-time job.
The job has evidently served him well. Boucher has a healthy complexion and physique of someone who spends plenty of time outdoors. His standard uniform is a t-shirt and jeans.
Boucher’s hands are perpetually stained with sap, but his clients don’t mind. With fewer flowers in bloom, the winter months are slow, so Boucher fixes cars and does the odd mechanical job to stay busy.
But bees are his passion. “They’re my friends,” he says with a sheepish smile, explaining that he always feels a bit guilty about disrupting a hive. “You see them working so hard every day. It makes you sad when you have to move them.”
Although his job requires that he be invasive, Boucher is immensely reverential of the creatures that supply his livelihood.
He’s so attune to their behaviour that he can detect when they are agitated. A few weeks ago while removing a hive, Boucher found the queen bee and held it in his hand.
“All the bees started swarming around me,” he said laughing, “I wanted to take a photo. The guy I was with was like, ‘Are you crazy? Quit messing around!’ ”
