Davy Gertel remembers a time when people didn’t get on a plane to Israel to make aliyah – they came by boat.
Davy Gertel works with his bees
“Only prime ministers flew,” says Gertel, 73, a pioneer who came to Israel from Montreal on a ship in 1949. “My family sold everything, packed a box, and came here, cold turkey.”
His entire extended family in Poland had been wiped out in the Holocaust, and this is what prompted his father to bring his wife, daughter and then-13-year-old son, Davy, to Israel.
Five years after their arrival, the Gertels settled in Moshav Orot, near Ashkelon, where Gertel and his wife still live today. He attended the nearby Nahalal Agricultural High School. It was there that he discovered what would become his lifelong passion – bees.
Bees were particularly important during the early years of the state. They were critical to the country’s development. “Without bees, you have no apples, pears, avocado, sunflower, watermelon, cucumbers, squash,” lists Gertel. “All of these plants require cross-pollination, which means they need bees.”
But this was not his only reason for going into the field. “I was fascinated by them, their behaviour,” says Gertel, one of Israel’s top beekeeping specialists. “When you raise cows or sheep or horses, they are mammals. They are a lot like us. But bees are a completely different world. And they are not domesticated. Their behaviour hasn’t changed for millions of years.
“I look at a nice bee the way someone else appreciates a beautiful dog or horse. I love bees.”
The first beehives in Israel were brought by the Templars. Based on findings at an excavated apiary near Beit Shean dating back to the time of King Solomon, it is estimated that those ancient bees produced some half a ton of honey per year.
The first modern Israeli beekeepers were in Nes Ziona. The city’s bee industry was started at the turn of the 20th century by an immigrant to Israel, Reuven Lerer, a Jew from Prussia (now in eastern Germany). Lerer traded his land for a farm formerly owned by a Templar descendant, who had abandoned his land – and his hives – and returned to Prussia, after losing his whole family to malaria.
Lerer gathered together a small group of farmers who became Israel’s first beekeepers. “In the beginning it was very good. It was World War II and there was no sugar, so honey was the only sweetener available,” says Gertel. Not only did Nes Tziona have a huge number of hives, it also had a huge number of orange groves, which make for the sweetest honey.
“I had the honour of knowing some of the founders,” says Gertel, who has a picture from the first Israeli beekeepers’ course dating back to the early 1900s. “Nuts, every single one of them.”
When Gertel started his beekeeping career, he had to work with the local apis mellifera syriaca bee, a bad-tempered race that was difficult to work with. He was among the first beekeepers to import friendlier bee races from Europe and America, and begin the process of “re-queening” hives and improving the local stock. Now, he says, the apis mellifera syriaca bee is non-existent in Israel.
In the beginning, he was among some 2,000 beekeepers across the country, a pool that has shrunk to about 200, each handling many more hives, a total of some 100,000 across Israel. “I think we’re one of the most crowded bee places in the world,” he says, adding that the United States has some two million hives.
“Bees have so much to teach us,” says Gertel. “They are all for one and one for all. They sacrifice themselves, and they work so hard. They are thrifty. They are amazing creatures. It’s one of the animals we like to compare ourselves with,” he says, noting that the bee appears on many crests of arms.
Gertel says that in some ways, the bees’ way of life encapsulates his political outlook. “When the drones finish mating, they drop down, dead. They don’t breathe a second more than needed,” he says. “Maybe it’s not politically correct, but I think maybe politicians could take a lesson from them – as soon as you’re not productive, you’re out.”
At the height of his career, Gertel kept 1,000 hives and made his livelihood from honey, which he produced some 40 tons of each year. But it grew too taxing for him to collect the honey, and care for them – to protect them against hornets, disease, colony collapse disorder and more recent problems such as insecticide illnesses – and five years ago, he sold most of his hives.
He still looks after some 100 of them, which he uses to raise and sell queen bees. “It keeps me busy,” says Gertel, explaining that when a hive loses its queen, they choose a random larva to become queen and feed it special food – royal jelly. When she is born, she stings all her sisters to death, mates, and starts laying eggs at a rate of 2,000 eggs per day, five times her own weight. At this point, Gertel puts her into a little box and sells her, and begins the process again, with another queen.
Now that he is semi-retired from the bee business, he has more time to spend with his four children and 12 grandchildren, all of whom live in Israel.
“We count our blessings every day,” he says. “Israel is such a miracle. Since we live it every day, we tend to forget. But everything is miraculous here – the language, the nature – and to not be a part of it would be a shame. I am so happy that I have been a part of it.”
