Metallica frontman James Hetfield discussed keeping bees on his property in a new Joe Rogan Experience interview. Alternative Nation transcribed the quotes.
“If you’re wearing black, they’ll all attack you. They think you’re a bear. If you’ve just eaten bananas, there’s a smell or something in it that is similar to their attack pheromone that they set off, so there’s a few things that I’ve learned over the years. I’ve learned this stuff from being in the Bee Club in the Bay Area. We would meet down at the American Legions Hall, and have a monthly meeting. Me and my buddy, we would just sit there, and kind of laugh about them. But we would sit there, we were there to learn. But there were people up there, ‘We inseminated the Queen with this, and we were counting bees.’”
“People that are so into it, and we were just sitting there, thinking what have we gotten ourselves into. It’s funny in a certain way, but I’m glad that it’s happening. At the end of the season you’ve got 500 pounds of honey, and you’re handing them out to your friends, and everyone is loving it. We’re bottling it up, my kids are filtering it. It’s straight from the hive into the bottle, after you filter it. It really helps with allergies, it helps with getting the pollens and nectar from the area, so when you take that in it helps build your immune system.”
“Absolutely. I think being stung by bees helps you too, it helps with getting your immune system built up.”
“I think there’s some people that do it for their lips here in LA.”
“But I tell you, those freak bees, the Africanized, now there’s a zombie bee, and we can get into that too, but they are aggressive, and like in any society, they do well. They produce a lot of honey, and they are very prolific in what they do.”
He also said the bee ‘brain juice’ has healing qualities.
“Even the kind of glue that they use to plug up holes, the royal jelly, which comes from the brain, that’s how they produce the queen. It’s brain juice man.”
