Steve Vai Discusses His Beekeeping Hobby

Hard rocker Steve Vai has a soft side -- he's a beekeeper. The guitar virtuoso happened upon the unlikely honey hobby when a swarm of bees in his neighbor's wall beautified his wife's garden. "I wanted to plant these fruit trees and I did some research and found that honeybees are really a fantastic way to pollinate so I just got a hive," he says. "I called up my local beekeeper and he brought me a wild swarm and I put in a colony."

The bees weren't always so cooperative with Vai who had to learn the hard way how to tame their natural instincts. "You puff a little smoke in the hive and they think there's a forest fire so they gorge themselves on honey and they can't sting you because they can't bend their abdomens," he says. "After a while, you go into the hive they get to know you and it's no problem. Honeybees are actually a lot mellower than you think. I'm the bee whisperer!"

Of course, this didn't happen without some trial and error. "One time I was capturing a wild swarm and I had to climb the tree over my studio," Vai says."I put my bee suit on and I had a big box that I was going to pull up a rope and you shake the tree and the swarm follows the Queen bee into the box. I had a pot handle tied to the other end of the rope and I threw it around the branch and I couldn't see because my veil would get in the way so I took my veil off and I threw the pot handle up and hit the swarm. A ball of bees the size of a basketball fell on my head and down my back and stung the piss out of me!"

Years later, Vai has cultivated his beekeeping business into charitable efforts especially during the holidays. "My family harvests the honey each year and we give some of it away at Christmas and auction the rest for charity," he says."I call it Fire Garden Honey because it's the name of one of my records. You can buy the honey and we auction it off for charity events like my Make a Noise Foundation."