Animals & Us
The Swarm in the Chaff Bag: How Bees Became a Life's Work
Russell Zabell
A beekeeper hands his life's work to the next generation, finding purpose in stepping back.
Kintsugi Studio
Animals & Us
Russell Zabell
A beekeeper hands his life's work to the next generation, finding purpose in stepping back.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Russell Zabell has worked with bees for more than 50 years, starting with a moment of pure chance. His father spotted a swarm hanging from a tree near Forest Hill in the late 1960s, grabbed it in nothing but a chaff bag and string, then tipped the captured bees into an empty box at home. Russell was a teenager when the stings started, repeated welts on his eyes, nose, and lips. Instead of developing an allergy like most people do, his body adapted. He became immune.
By the time he turned 20, Russell had built 99 hives from scratch, teaching himself carpentry to make the boxes and frames. A hobby became a trade, then a business. He moved his family to Far North Queensland in 2005 to teach Indigenous men how to make native bee boxes and harvest wild bees. In 2012, he and his wife Janine left his work as a carpenter-teacher and started a beekeeping business together, growing it to 400 honeybee hives and more than a thousand native bee colonies at its peak.
Now at 67, Russell is stepping back. He and Janine are keeping a small number of hives as a hobby, loading up their motor home instead. A young workman named Diego is taking over the work. It was not an easy decision to hand over something that shaped his entire adult life, but Russell knows the bees will outlast him, and passing them on means they will keep going. He speaks about bees the way someone speaks about a life they have lived deeply: with specifics, with quiet respect, and with the knowledge that what matters most is what comes next.
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