BTPS: Behind the Bees of "The Rivals of Amziah King"

BTPS: Behind the Bees of "The Rivals of Amziah King"

Jeff Ott
Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast Shorts, your quick dive into the latest buzz in beekeeping.

Becky Masterman
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Jeff Ott
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Becky Masterman
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Jeff Ott
Hey everybody, welcome to this Beekeeping Today podcast short Today we are joined by Adam Hickman of Foxhound Bees. He is here to talk to us about the Rivals of Amziah King, the new movie that's out in theaters today.

Adam Hickman
Hey Jeff. Hey Becky, thanks for having us on.

Jeff Ott
Welcome Adam. Yeah, thank you for joining us. This is exciting.

an actual movie about beekeeping. there's been a couple in history. There's The of course the big one was Ulee's Gold.

And I remember going to that years and years ago, sitting in a theater full of these big gruff beekeepers and they start crying. And it's just like It these guys that you wouldn't see ever cry, but they're sitting there tears in their face. This is a a great movie for Focusing on Beekeeper.

Adam Hickman
Yeah, it's I mean Ulee's Gold was super influential. and even more influential was you know the Beekeeper movie, right? That came out like two weeks ago or two years ago.

that was Jason Statham? Yeah, exactly. No, that was a terrible movie.

Yeah. Terrible movie. The What do you mean?

Becky Masterman
We all know where to hide our guns now.

Adam Hickman
Exactly. Yeah. yeah, that one came out and you know that did not represent beekeepers very accurately but Amziah King, you know that movie is all about beekeeping. They kept it as real as they could. it's a really great movie for beekeepers in our community.

And I would I would put it on the same line as Ulee's Gold because it really does highlight the bees and beekeepers really well.

Jeff Ott
Well, I kind of put the cart before the horse, but tell us a little bit about yourself, Adam. Who are you? What do you do? And then we'll get into how you got involved in this movie.

Adam Hickman
Sure. So it's Adam Hickman. I'm the owner of Foxhound Bee Company in Irondale, Alabama.

I'm a beekeeper myself. I'm a master beekeeper, went through the EAS program and participate and volunteer with that organization every year. and we are a beekeeping supply company that ships all over the country and internationally.

We probably ship to all 50 states every month. and we built a brand new facility that is a proper retail beekeeping experience. it's about a 5,000-square-foot building.

Opened it in November of last year. And it's just a great place. So we're kind of have stepped into this role of people say that we're big.

I don't I don't see that we I don't think that we are a big company. We're still small. We have a small staff.

but we wanted to make a place where beekeepers and non-beekeepers can come and learn about bees. So I run the beekeeping business full time, keep bees, we sell queens and ship equipment all over the place.

Becky Masterman
I know Foxhound has a great social media presence. Is that how the movie found you?

Adam Hickman
the movie found us by being in the right location at the right time. So somebody from the set Was walked into our old building looking for inspiration on how beekeepers organize things. think about like how we stack our boxes, pallets of wax, all of those things and came in for inspiration and really liked us, went out to our bee yard.

spent some time in the bees and apparently we were just really influential on her and she took that experience went back to the producers and the directors. and pitched hiring us to be the bee wranglers, the consultants for the movie and a month later we were in the bee yard with Matthew McConaughey teaching him how to look like a beekeeper. Well that was quick.

Becky Masterman
That is quick.

Adam Hickman
Yeah, tell me about it.

Becky Masterman
How many how many bee wrangler gigs had you had before this one?

Adam Hickman
zero official bee wrangler gigs. I was completely underqualified to have this role, but knew about bees and knew about the biology and met with the director and producer and and those guys and they laid out three scenes for us and said, hey, what do you think about doing these? Can you can you do those?

and there's three major bee scenes in the movie. one with Matthew where he has bees on his arm. You see that in the trailer.

another one where they do a cutout scene, and then another one that is similar to Matthew's scene, but it's with Angelina looking glass at the end of the movie. So those were the big scenes that they wanted and they also didn't want they wanted all live bees, no fake bees, no CGI, and no veils or suits on the actors at all. So those that was the ask that that he gave and they gave to us.

Becky Masterman
Wow, that is a that last one is really something to think about.

Adam Hickman
yeah, yeah, it is. And we so yeah, he asked for there not to be any suits and veils and I think there's a couple of reasons for it. You know, one is the character is pretty Zen, pretty one with the Bees, you know, kind of falls into this motif of Well the bees recognize me, they're my friends, if I'm calm, they're calm.

so that's kind of his style of beekeeping. So he didn't want a veil for that reason. and then also I think Matthew McConaughey is pretty expensive.

so they didn't want to cover up that face. so I think that was the other reason for it too.

Jeff Ott
Wow. For our listeners who know nothing about the movie and have not heard or seen the trailer, can you give us an overview of what the movie is about?

Adam Hickman
Yeah, absolutely. So Matthew McConaughey Matthew McConaughey's character is Amziah King, and he is a beekeeper. We as beekeepers would describe him as a sideliner.

he produces honey, doesn't move hives around. He just has multiple apiaries, maybe fifteen, twenty hives per apiary. and collects honey from them, harvests them, and then sells them in little 12-ounce or 16-ounce bears and so that the whole movie has boxes and bees and beekeeping jargon and extractors and uncapping lines and on all those things that the beekeepers know.

And so he is a beekeeper, he runs into his old foster daughter. and she's lost, he's kind of lost, so he starts to teach her about the business. she gets wrapped up in the business with his beekeeping community.

and it's a very it's a southern movie. So there's this really awesome scene. where he is teaching her about potlucks and he's walking down the line and he's saying, This is a potluck and eat this one.

And then he tells a story about the people who made that one. And then it's it might be like mac and cheese and he's like, Don't eat this one. That family's crazy.

So he's going down the line kind of explaining all these dishes. And it's so it's a very like southern movie. It's shot in Birmingham, where we're at, but it's set in Oklahoma.

so if you're if you kind of have a southern bend and you've been to like Potlucks and like church musicals and you know just a very like a good group of friends that do beekeeping together, play music together. and just the ragtag group. so that's the community that he builds, and then something happens in the middle of the movie where she has to take over.

so she takes over the business, some hives get stolen. and then she works with somebody else to like steal these back. So it's a it's best described as two movies in one.

it's an indie movie, it's kind of crazy, it's funny. it's shocking. It's got some drama to it.

It gets a little dark at times, so it's it's not a normal movie, but the beekeeping is beautiful and most people will really enjoy it. It's got some language in it, but most people will will be able to get past that.

Jeff Ott
How true to the beekeeping does it keep? I mean, is it ho not to offend Hollywood, but is it's not Hollywoodized Beekeeping. Is it is it's not like the beekeeper movie beekeeping. This is more factual beekeeping? Correct.

Adam Hickman
Yeah, so it's It is Hollywood, so there are some things that are kind of misstatements that get that get said or some Sometimes they move boxes in the movie, like a real one that I really notice is they are they have full supers of honey, you know, that are like sixty pounds. And they're sprinting with them. You know, and it's stuff like that where I'm kinda like I did that guy he doesn't look that strong, but I you know, and that's what the director wanted and in those in those some of those scenes, like I spoke up and I was like, hey You know, actors remember that these are like 60 pounds, remember the training that we did.

it's hard to run in these things. And then the director was like, No, I w I want them running for a different reason. so it's it's true, it's it's not sensationalized, but there are some things where you're just a little bit like, okay, well, as a beekeeper, you just have to suspend relief a little bit and recognize it's not a documentary.

Becky Masterman
That's fair. Well, it's also being r very well received, right? You said that you went to the premiere.

Adam Hickman
Yeah, I I'm very grateful that I got to be a part of this whole thing. just in general. Like it was a once in a lifetime experience to do something like this.

especially for it to just like follow my lap and walk through the doors. so incredibly grateful to have been along for the ride and somehow have my name attached to this experience. So that is not lost on me, the lost on me one bit.

and as a part of that, I got invited out to see it for the first time in a public setting at South by Southwest Festival in I think that was twenty-five. so I got to go do that and go do like a pre-party and an after party thing and that was that was great. And then it came out this year and there was a another one of these, another screening.

that was that happened in Austin, Texas. So I went out for that again. McConaughey was there.

They dedicated the theater to him. we basically turned that into a date night for my wife and I. So we went out to Austin. We got to go to the screening.

and this like pre-party and there was a concert that McConaughey put on with the guys that were in the film who wrote a lot of the music. So this is not a musical, but there is a lot of music in it. And it's It's very entertaining if you like bluegrass, or if you like kind of like it's not corny singing, it's not like frozen.

it's you know, just kind of very good like if you were hanging out with your buddies and jamming out in the living room type of type of music. The guys that were in the film who did a lot of the music had this concert. So we got to go watch that.

and then there was one more premiere that happened in Nashville a week later, and I got to go up there And watch it again, but this time I was with beekeepers. So I was able to invite a bunch of beekeepers to go see this too. So it was four out of the five guys that worked on the movie.

and then I invited a few other beekeeping friends that live in Tennessee and then also live in Alabama to drive up and watch this too. So I got to watch it with them and I heard them chuckling at the whole running with the foxes stuff because If you're a beekeeper, you just see that instantly and you're like, oh, that's that's not possible.

Becky Masterman
but it's a really bad honey crop.

Adam Hickman
Yes, exactly. Yeah. and they're running into the honey house and they go through this montage of extracting all the honey and running it through a chain uncapper.

and that was a funny experience on its own of trying to Trying to explain to actors that you can't uncap a frame of honey twice. you know, they're used to doing multiple takes, and I'm like, hey, this thing's gonna come through, go through there and it's gonna look different on the other side, and like Just keep in mind that like you we only get a couple tries, and you have one try on this side, and then if you want to do it again, you can flip the frame over. You got another try there, but you can't uncap a uncapped frame of honey.

So great experience getting to watch it with beekeepers and celebrate the movie with everybody. Did you help design the honey house then as well and equipment and the layout? The role was originally doing those three beekeeping scenes.

And then it quickly expanded into, hey, do you know anybody who has extractors? And they need to be big, like 60 frame extractors. Hey, do you know anybody who has like beekeeping boxes that look like they're old and weathered?

so I ended up just connecting them with a lot of beekeepers who were who would rent or sell their equipment to the set to the film. or sourcing a lot of the equipment myself. So it expanded into I was sourcing supplies for them and then it also expanded into anytime there was any of that equipment on set They needed somebody there who knew how it worked.

so the extractor is one of those really old ones that have you know a flywheel on it and you engage it and you adjust it based on the speed. So It's pretty technical, kind of dangerous stuff. So we ended up being on set for a lot of those reasons as well.

So two months of that summer, it was beekeepers were constantly just kind of working with the film crew to do our best to make sure that it wasn't you know medium me medium box, medium box, medium box, and then a deep box on top

Becky Masterman
You know, you know that type of stuff.

Adam Hickman
They're not beekeepers, so we got to lend our expertise as much as we could.

Becky Masterman
Hey, do you want to share any of your secrets for how to work with really nice bees and not need a veil?

Adam Hickman
Yes. So I'll I'll kind of allude to one of these things that we did on set and if I was really excited about how well this worked. So in the cutout scene.

Matthew did use a veil and that was kind of the only time what when we kind of convinced them to put the actors in protective gear. 'Cause they were doing a real cutout with a laying queen, brood, eggs, honey. It was a full-size colony that we that they were gonna do this cutout.

But the way that we set it up was we built these false two by six stud bays that were about 75 yards away from where we were shooting. And we let the bees build all this natural comb inside of those bays. And then they had the set that they were shooting in about 75 yards away.

And so what we did when, you know, three or four weeks had gone by and these bill these bees built this like beautiful comb and these little stud bays, when it was time to shoot we took off one side of these bays and pushed it into the very back of the set that had stud walls exposed. So he pushed it into the back of it. so when the actors would cut through the drywall, it would expose the full-size colony and the comb and everything.

And it worked out really nicely. But because we set up the bees home 75 yards away, that when he did these this cutout and all the bees were released into the air, they would clear the set and they would just go back to where they came from. so we did that and that worked out really nicely and we and there was two the other main location that we shot at, we did kind of the same thing too, that when we put a lot of nurse colonies full of nurse bees and young bees out into this field that we were pulling from.

And when it was time to shoot the scene, we would take frames, put it into the hives that the be the actors were working with. the night before and then the next day when they were working, all of the older bees, foragers would leave and go back to where they came from. So they were actually working with a lot of like very young nurse bees on set.

So I felt like that was a a smart thing that we did and it worked out really nicely and it allowed them to work with the bees as safe as they possibly could.

Jeff Ott
Really that's really smart. Yeah.

Adam Hickman
Well it was I can't take credit. It was a team effort. It was it was a bunch of us who were working on all this stuff.

Becky Masterman
I would say getting credit for you should g get a lot of credit for doing a fake cutout. Colony.

Adam Hickman
Yeah.

Becky Masterman
That's that would be a little bit daunting.

Adam Hickman
It was it we had to work with the set designer and then Yappy, who's a friend of mine, Yappy Bee Man is what people call him. And then Brian Booth on my team. Brian is an engineer.

Yappy does cutouts all the time. So, you know, those two guys were on the team specifically for that scene because, you know, they Yappy supplied some of the comb that the that the B started with. So we he supplied the comb that was the right shape.

We put it into the stud bay, made a couple packages, dumped them in. fed them and got them to build. So yeah that design, most of that credit goes to Y Yappy and Brian for putting that together.

Jeff Ott
The iconic scene of Matthew McConaughey with the bees on his hand Any secrets on that as well? Always have backup bees.

Adam Hickman
Always we learn that. So always have a backup, right? Like you're recording this and you've got a you've got a backup recorder, right?

Yeah. so we did, I mean it's a bee beard, basically, is what we did. and we made two packages both with we've pulled the pulled the bees from hives that had mostly young bees in it.

So the day before we would make these packages We would take the colony and we'd move it 20 yards away, in addition to just being a young colony with lots of capped brood anyway. so we did those types of things and made these packages, unfortunately, or unfortunately The first package we were going to work with, a queen died in the cage. And these were these are kind of stressful situations for the bees.

So The queen died in the cage, and obviously it's hard to do a b-beard without a without a queen. And so we actually had to go to the other one. But when you see in the movie of him holding the queen, like that's a real queen.

and that was from that second package. that we used and he's holding that queen. It took about forty minutes to do that whole that whole scene.

Matthew's total professional, listens really well, stays very calm. You could you look at him and you can think like, yeah, he's like he's in the zone basically. And I don't know if you've ever done a bee beard, but it's not the most incredible feeling of all the bees like scratching on you.

And but he kept really calm. And I guess one tip that we learned was when you start putting bees in the air, don't start too high. because we started putting bees in the air.

and we we used a Pro Nuc lid and kind of tossed them into the air and they started maybe like fifteen feet up. And so from fifteen feet up, they went like another five feet or another ten feet up and then So the mass of bees were higher than we needed them, and they actually kind of went up into a tree for a second. Like the swarm went into a tree, and we're like, wow, hey, they need to come back.

down quickly because we need we need them down here on the on this arm, right? And as beekeepers, we knew that this would eventually happen, that they would find the queen and that it would start kind of coming down. but it's hard to explain that to you know the crew and Matthew who's like you know sitting there with these bees on his arm.

but they ended up coming down because we took some of the we had more bees. and we ended up just kind of like flinging them at Matthew and they sort of collecting on his hand and scenting and that brought the rest of the bees down. and it ended up working like absolutely beautiful.

Like it's it's it's a really kind of the beautiful scene in the movie.

Jeff Ott
I look forward to seeing it. Adam, this has been really, really enjoyable. Would you ever do this again? I don't think so

Adam Hickman
I absolutely love doing it. but it's it's kind of like winning the Super Bowl in your rookie year. y I feel like I feel like anything after this will just be a paycheck when this experience was so amazing and incredible and it still is, that I'll I'll be able to hang my hat on this experience kind of the rest of my life.

Becky Masterman
Did you had to leave your bees for two months during the filming?

Adam Hickman
So for that to take care of your bees. For that two month period it was I wasn't on set Every day, every week. There was a lot of like Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.

and then we'd we'd have to do some prep you know, offset as well. But the store was still running and you know, shout out to Brian Booth, who was on the team, and Amy Sieber, who were making sure that the store was still running and customers were still getting served while I was out. you know, gallivanting with celebrities, right?

Jeff Ott
Yeah, yeah, you're play playing Hollywood. That's fantastic. Yes, exactly.

Yeah. That's fantastic. Well Adam, it's been it's wonderful hearing about your stories of your the movie experience with The Rivals of Amziah King.

And I hope our beekeeper listeners can go out and watch that in the theaters and it's out there now, playing.

Adam Hickman
Yeah, yeah, it's out it's out It's it's out there right now. I'm not sure how long it's gonna be in theaters. eventually it'll probably go to streaming.

but we're encouraging people to like go watch the movie in their bee suit or their veil. and people are doing it. They're sending us a bunch of pictures of it and it's great.

either people are doing it or they're also saying, Oh, there's no way I could ever wear my bee suit out public. It's disgusting. Yeah, it's disgusting.

So

Jeff Ott
Well thank you, Adam. And I look forward to seeing that movie here real soon.

Adam Hickman
Great. Thank you, Jeff.

Becky Masterman
Thank you.