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July/August 2006 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Moose mystery Feature: Century club Feature: Honey Ranchers The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

Bears and vandals won’t go into the old church on Rock Mountain in Bridesville, B.C. Even the antique dealer who tried to steal its bell was stopped dead in his tracks. Bees just don’t welcome poorly intentioned intruders. Ray Levesque, caretaker of these "Catholic" bees and lover of historical landmarks, got the abandoned house of worship re-roofed on his own dime. Moving the bees into the church 21 years ago gave him an excuse to regularly visit the hills and meadows, unimpeded by houses or major roads in all directions, just this side of the Washington border.

The church meadow bursts with clovers — red, sweet, white, Dutch — along with wild rose, buckbrush, snowberry, wild chokecherry and alfalfa. This is Levesque’s honey crop. He is one of the southern B.C. interior’s most ingenious and essential characters — an apiarist — and has been this area’s government-appointed apiculture inspector for 28 years. Beekeepers are folk artists who bridge the gap between agriculture, art and industry, individuals who, through their own quirky means, propagate a key link in the food chain. Some keepers are of the competitive, territorial, commercial variety, while others are of the "if it smells good, I’ll smoke it" school of thought. All have bizarre tales of the land, of one another and of having been stung in unconventional places.

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