Actually, it was sugar rationing that drove me into beekeeping.” Dad was dying of cancer, and we were talking about a number of things, bees included. I knew his father had also kept bees, so I assumed Dad came into the bees along with the Guernseys. He quit the 10th grade in 1941 to run the dairy farm when his last brother enlisted in the army.His father was not as young or as healthy as he’d once been and could not run the farm by himself. As it turned out, Grandpa had stopped keeping bees several years before, and the equipment was sitting empty. It wasn’t until the government clamped down on sugar supplies during World War II that the need for sweeteners got Dad thinking about honey. “My dad liked sugar in his coffee,” he remembered. “He didn’t have many luxuries, but this was one he insisted on.” “So the government didn’t ration honey?” I asked. “No,” he replied. “In fact, beekeepers could get extra rations of sugar to feed their bees.” Whatever the reason, Dad took to beekeeping and never looked back. He ran as many as a dozen hives at one time (about 11 more than needed to sweeten the family’s coffee), and I remember us always having at least two or three in the yard when I was growing up. I was always a daydreamer as a kid. As the eighth of 10 kids, it was easy for me to get lost in the shuffle. When my head wasn’t buried in a book, my mind was miles away from whatever chores I was doing on the farm.So, while I always thought honey bees were kind of cool, I had about as much interest in beekeeping as I did in milking cows. Besides, bees were always Dad’s thing he did on his own, and he was never one to talk about stuff unless you asked about it. I didn’t ask about bees until after Dad quit beekeeping in the 1990s. But I found him more than willing to share. I was the first one to take up his hobby, and he gave me lots of advice, along with a bunch of his old equipment. Most of all, he just loved to talk about bees. Whenever I would call my parents about anything at all, he was the first to bring up the bees. My brother Frank took up beekeeping several years after me, and brother Tom recently made his property available to a commercial beekeeper to place about 50 hives for the summer. In fact, on the day after Dad’s funeral I was at Tom’s house helping him catch a couple of swarms and assemble the equipment to house them. He had officially become a beekeeper. “Kind of a fitting sendoff to Dad,” I said afterward.Tom nodded. “He would have enjoyed this.” Dad lived about six weeks after his cancer diagnosis. We were all very fortunate that his mind was sharp and we were able to visit with him, ask questions, share stories … and say goodbye. The last time I saw him, about 36 hours before he died, he was very weak and had difficulty talking. But he was still alert and communicative. It was my last chance, and I told him how much I loved him and appreciated all that he had done for us kids over the years. But I realized later that I’d never thanked him for the greatest joy he had given me.Dad … if you’re reading this … thank you for the bees.