‘I dream of bees’: one boy’s encounter with a swarm in Sicily led to a lifetime’s devotion

Beekeeper Carlo Amodeo points out the queen in one of his apiaries of Sicilian black bees in Trabia, Sicily. Photograph: Monica Pelliccia

It was love at first sight when five-year-old Carlo Amodeo first saw a swarm of black bees. He could not stop thinking about them and every night for a week he had the same dream: of building a house for the bees made from wood using his toy carpentry set.

Amodeo, now 62, still remembers that first encounter. It took place in the 1960s, while he was spending the summer with his mother at the seaside 30 minutes from Palermo, in north-west Sicily. He saw the swarm hanging from an olive trunk during a stroll in the countryside. “I was paralysed, motionless like a dog pointing at prey,” he recalls. “Then my mother dragged me off to the beach.”