Julian Wooten knows how to create a real buzz

WHEN 63-year-old Julian Wooten was growing up on his family’s eastern North Carolina farm, he used to get his kicks from watching honeybees instead of television.

“I remember when Daddy would get his veil and his smoker and go out and do what they call ‘rob the bees,’ take off some of that fresh honey and bring it in,” he says. “Many small farmers back then had honeybees. They kept them primarily for food, for their honey. I don’t think they knew a lot about the pollination back then, but they were helping us produce melons, cucumbers and squash.”

Before Wooten was old enough to get his driver’s license, he had purchased his first bees. Although he spent much of his adult career managing the natural resource and environmental program at a nearby Marine base, he currently devotes his time to his Jacksonville, N.C. farm, where he grows blueberries and tends to about 100 colonies containing 30,000 to 40,000 bees each.

He also was happy to manage the on-set colonies for this month’s Fox Searchlight release “The Secret Life of Bees.” By the time preproduction started, he found himself running a full-blown beekeeping school for Queen Latifah, Dakota Fanning, Tristan Wilds and several other members of the cast and crew. “I’m just an old country boy in eastern North Carolina that has had bees much of my life,” he says. “I’m delighted that I had an opportunity to participate. I think that this movie is going to be good for the honeybee and the beekeeping industry.”

Whatever will bee, will bee: Wooten found that the movie bees were a laid-back bunch. “I didn’t know about the bees that were going be used on the set, and I wanted to look at them and see what kind of disposition they had,” he says. “The first hive that I opened, I said, ‘Well, I don’t know what this is, beginner’s luck or if this is the way they’re going to be every day, but they’re perfect today. They’re calm. They’re gentle.’ And they had just been on a trip. But those bees were just nice.”

Some like it hot: Although bees tend to be on their best behavior when the weather is warm, sunny and calm, “The Secret Life of Bees” shot in the dead of winter. “I recommended a greenhouse, which we got, and we put the bees in it,” says Wooten. “That enabled us to work on some days that we wouldn’t have been able to. Bees are cold-blooded animals, and they cluster up to stay warm. They have to keep their temperature at 90 or a little bit better to survive.”

Bee-siness casual: Wooten made sure that Latifah, Fanning and Wilds were dressed appropriately in helmets, veils and bee-friendly clothing. “There are bee suits that are available now that you just slip on as a self-contained thing,” he says. “But I still go with the old equipment. Khaki pants and a khaki shirt is what I like to wear. You don’t want to wear dark-colored clothes. The bees associate the dark with maybe bears, skunks, raccoons, whatever might come along. You don’t want to use flannel-type stuff. That feels like fur. And don’t wear fragrances. They don’t like deodorant and hair spray. Keep that kind of thing down, if you can.”

But it wasn’t just how the actors were dressed that mattered; interacting with the members of the hive in the right way was just as important. “One of the things I told the actors, and I do this, I talk to the bees a lot,” he says. “I told them, ‘When you’re working the bees, talk to them. I don’t think that they’ll understand you, but I do it. I talk to them.’ And Tristan did it. And he said, ‘OK girls, I’m not going to hurt you today now. I’m here to do so and so.’ And Queen Latifah did the same thing. It gets your mind away from what you’re doing.”

Cakewalk: When the director asked Wooten to train a bee to crawl across a cake plate, the beekeeper spent hours observing the insects’ behavior. “I noticed that as the bees were filling up [with nectar and pollen], they would walk or crawl like four or five, six inches before they’d take wing,” he says. “And so I prepared a piece of paper with some lines on it so I could judge what they were doing. When I got ready for the cake plate, it was that same principle that I used. . . . We fed the bees all the time. It was my thinking that if there’s a happy bee, it’s a bee with a full stomach. And it worked.”