For Bogdan Hemon, beekeeping is part of his family tradition. When Bob’s predecessors migrated from Ukraine to Bosnia in the beginning of twentieth century, the story says, they brought with them a beehive.

When Bob came to Canada as a refugee from Bosnia, his first priority was to get a job and his second was to start beekeeping again.
Before he purchased his first beehive he would observe beautiful Canadian nature and would enjoy watching bees pollinate flowers.

The world of bees is for him the one realm where everything is always good, the way it has always been and is always supposed to be, where it all makes sense.

Before extracting honey there is a lot of work that needs to be done.
Bob needs to fight varroa, the pernicious parasite that decimates bees, smoking the hives with appropriate natural medicine. Then there are weak bee communities, those sad queenless hives, which need to be merged with strong ones.

In the spring Bob orders new, mated queens from Ukraine or from California. When it gets warmer he produces his own queens in order to create new communities or to replace the older queens.

Bob and his wife Nadia work hard these days as they extract honey, pack it in pail containers and jars.The everlasting project of beekeeping requires constantly finding solutions and making decisions. Bob enjoys beekeeping and says that it keeps him connected to nature and the Creator. He appreciates bees because he knows that without bees people would not be able to survive.