Asa-chan the Bee Chaser

8 Dec 2007 Category: Food, Japan, Nature

Asa-chan the Bee Chaser

They say that Japanese honeybees produce a very unique flavor of honey. Normally, the honey that people in Japan spread on their toast is made by European honeybees. Honey made by the Japanese variety of honeybee has a deeper, more complex flavor, and certain people have adopted it as their “secret ingredient” in cooking, but Japanese honeybees are very hard to domesticate. This man spent his youth with Japanese honeybees and their honey, and he’s dedicated most of his life to the study of bees. The people in his village treated him as an eccentric and an outcast, but now this character has become the symbol of the village. Exactly what kind of life is one spent chasing bees?

Interviewed by Takafumi Suzuki
Translated by Claire Tanaka


Mr. Tominaga, a great lover of bees.

Mr. Tominaga, when did you first become interested in bees?

I first entered the world of bees when I was in grade 3 of elementary school. At first, my dad took me out bee-chasing with him. After that, it was so fun and I just got more and more into it. Back in those days there wasn’t much to eat, so everyone went out looking for bees. Bees were a source of protein for us then. Of course, if you got stung by a hornet you could die. So there we were, risking our lives trying to catch bees. That’s the way it was back then. Catch a bee and then eat it right there – that was tasty, really tasty.

Didn’t you have a lot of hard times in your life of chasing bees?

Fifty-nine years. That’s how long I’ve been living the bee life. During that time of course I’ve gotten stung a few times. Now, my immune system is so strong that if I get stung in the morning, it’s healed by night. I made the decision to spend my life studying bees when I was in Junior High. When you start learning more about bees, it just gets more and more interesting. My family, they always hassled me about it. “Why are you always going on about those bees? Why don’t you get a real job?” In those days, we didn’t even have enough money to buy rice, you know. Of course they said “all you care about are the bees”. But you know, I never quit. And look at me now.


The fascinating world of bees

The worker bees all serve a single queen

I hear you’re able to speak to the bees?

Well, I have spent my whole life studying bees, and after about 42 or 43 years I started to be able to converse with the bees. I use one of my hands to talk with them. If I use both hands, I can calm them down when they get angry. You know, bees have a very rich emotional life. But no matter how good you take care of them, they won’t remember your face. But you can get them to build nice big hives, have them draw letters, you can teach them lots of things. That’s why I’m thinking I’ll teach the bees how to dance next. I’d like to somehow teach them to dance to the theme from “Ina no Kantaro”.

I have a hard time believing you’re able to converse with bees…

Everyone says that. Even here in Nakagawa, at first no one would believe me when I said I could talk with the bees. They wouldn’t listen. So I thought I have to find a way to make them believe, and I called up a TV station and asked them to come and do a piece on me. And so footage of me having a conversation with a bee named Hanako was broadcast on TV. Everyone in the village saw that, and now they all say “Asa-chan, you really can talk to them. That’s amazing.”

A Doraemon mosaic made of bee carcasses at the Bee Museum

Mr. Tominaga, tell me about the Japanese bees which you’ve domesticated.

The honey most people in Japan eat is produced by European honeybees. Those European honeybees can’t survive unless they are cared for by man. They’re too sensitive to the cold. You take care of them, and that’s how they live. But my Japanese bees, they are really strong. They can handle the cold well. You could say they’re very independent. They have no need to be cared for by humans. Actually, they really hate to have their affairs meddled-with by humans. So if someone they don’t know tries to domesticate them, they just run away.

But, bees live in swarms, don’t they?

The queen bee decides what to do, and all those tens of thousands of bees follow her. The queen bee can tell in a day whether a place is right for her swarm or not. Whether the place has the right climate or not, how it is in the summer, the winter. She can tell all that in just one day. That’s why people who want to raise Japanese bees have to know a lot about the basics of beekeeping. There are so many cases where it goes fine one year, and then fails the next.


A hive made by guiding the bees with sign language

A giant hive

Queen bees are really talented then, aren’t they?

There is only one queen in a hive. In a larger hive, you can have 30,000 to 50,000 worker bees under the control of one queen. A smaller one might have a couple thousand. All the worker bees are female. Males are only born to mate. After they mate, they die. Even the queen, when she loses her ability to produce eggs, she is driven from the hive and killed. In a hive, normally there is only one queen, but it’s different when they swarm. During a swarm, the number of bees in the hive grows, and just for a moment, there are two queens. Then the first queen leaves the hive. That’s because she has gotten old and started to lose her ability to produce eggs.

So, tell me how the village’s bee museum came to be.

A big department store in Shinjuku, Tokyo was having a special display of Nagano products, and they asked if I wanted to put some of my hives on display. I submitted some of the hives I’d been collecting around my house. And what do you know, they sold like hotcakes. The cheaper ones went for about 30,000 to 70,000 yen – we sold lots of those – and the more expensive ones, I sold one for about 700,000 yen. The people passing by all stopped to look and the hives. So then the people in the village thought we could make something of this. I’ve always wanted to make a bee museum, so I proposed my idea and they agreed to make one.


Honey made by Japanese honeybees

Many products on sale at the village culture centre bear Asa-chan’s name.

So that’s how Nakagawa became the village of the bees.

Nowadays, whenever someone wants to make some kind of special local product it’s always “Asa-chan sherbet” or “Asa-chan biscuits”, Asa-chan this, Asa-chan that. I don’t think they need to stick “Asa-chan” on everything – it’s kind of embarassing.

I hear you’ve recently started a collaboration with a big company, even though you’ve been going it alone all these years.

You know that herbal liqueur, Yomeishu? That was invented in Nakagawa, and anyway they built a new factory and they want to start selling honey made by Japanese honeybees. Now I’m working together with them. I’ve been contacted by some big department stores in Tokyo too. I can’t get enough honey to keep up with the demand. I’ve had to turn them down.

“The movement to domesticate Japanese honeybees is spreading all over Japan.”

So, what are you planning to do next?

Now I’m involved with an association called the Shinshu Japan Honeybee Association. The movement to domesticate Japanese honeybees is spreading all over Japan. You know, the method for taking honey from the hive is a trade secret, but I fell very ill a few years ago and I thought to myself, I’ve spent decades researching this and if I died it would all be lost. And the next person would have to spend decades to learn the same things over again. So I thought, that wouldn’t be any good to anyone. So once I got out of the hospital, I started going all over the place, spreading the word.


The Bee Museum（Bougakusou）
4489 Ohkusa, Nakamura village, Nagano prefecture　

Asakazu Tominaga
Born in Nakagawa Village in 1938. Apiologist.

14 Comments

  1. it’s simply amazing and amusing that someone could be foscusing on one thing his/her whole life. I admire those people! so, hats off to you, Mr. Tominaga!

    Posted by: scarlett on January 4th, 2008 at 6:25 pm

  2. that’s so cute

    Posted by: angellesmell on January 6th, 2008 at 4:03 am

  3. […] Asa-chan the Bee Chaser [PingMag MAKE] (tags: japan art bees) […]

    Posted by: links for 2008-01-06 < Travelers Diagram on January 7th, 2008 at 7:17 am

  4. Thats a great story.

    Posted by: nicholas on February 16th, 2008 at 9:48 am

  5. Mr Tominaga is a very special person to have learned so much about bees.I was very interested to read that he can communicate with them so well.

    He didn’t mention the bees’ milk,royal jelly,bee pollen or propolis ; I wonder if he harvests those bee products?The healing and nutritional properties of these bee products is impressive.

    Japanese honey sounds very good.

    Thank you for an interesting article.

    Emma Howard, Hawaii

    Posted by: Emma Howard on February 17th, 2008 at 7:33 am

  6. after reading this article , I went to nagano and founf Asachan . Now he is generously teaching me wild honeybee keeping . very interesting indeed . wild bees make a lot less honey than cultivated bees , and the propolis and royal jelly is inside the honey apparently . thank you for bringing this truly a wonderful person to our attention .

    Posted by: david on December 22nd, 2008 at 1:48 am

  7. süper site

    Posted by: goruntulu sohbet on July 25th, 2011 at 11:52 pm

  8. This is good Internet marketing and public relations.

    Posted by: christian louboutin on November 10th, 2011 at 10:46 am

  9. There are certainly a variety of details like that to take into consideration. That could be a nice point to convey.

    Posted by: lancaster auto body on November 11th, 2011 at 9:09 am

  10. I have to examine with you here, which is not something I usually do! I take pleasure in studying a website that can make individuals think. Additionally, thanks for permitting me to remark!

    Posted by: paving contractors lancaster on November 11th, 2011 at 9:09 am

  11. Your place is valueble for me. Thanks!…

    Posted by: metal roofing new york on November 11th, 2011 at 9:10 am

  12. It’s hard to find knowledgeable people on this topic however you sound like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks

    Posted by: new jersey solar energy on November 11th, 2011 at 9:13 am

  13. I like your way of blogging. I bookmarked it to my bookmark website list and will be checking back soon.

    Posted by: hospital hershey pa on November 11th, 2011 at 9:16 am

  14. It really is a exceptional collection of information you mentioned here, I really think we can be expecting much more shortly.

    Posted by: Krakow airport transfer on January 5th, 2012 at 4:11 pm

  • Share and Enjoy:
  • del.icio.us
  • Fark
  • NewsVine
  • RawSugar
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • digg
Previously on PingMag MAKE