Brad and Karla Queen, along with actor Angelina LookingGlass, director Andrew Patterson, his wife, and a production assistant from the movie The Rivals of Amziah King, enjoyed three months together in Broken Bow, wrapping up production of the film. A lot of the filming was with Brad and his bee yard. The movie will be released on August 14 in AMC theaters. (Contributed photo.)
by Tawsha Brinkley-Davenport
The Hollywood production trucks have packed up and left Broken Bow, but for residents Brad and Karla Queen, the buzz and storytelling are just beginning. Beekeeping began as a hobby for Brad Queen in 2021; at the time, he had no idea that by 2026 he would have 50 hives and be part of a major motion picture. But that is where he finds himself today, along with his wife Karla.
Over the last three months, he has hosted movie director Andrew Patterson, originally from Oklahoma City, and his crew at their home in Broken Bow.
Patterson has been here filming some of the final scenes of his latest movie “The Rivals of Amziah King,” starring Matthew McConaughey and Kurt Russell. The main action and majority of the actors were filmed in Alabama. But when the crew ran into some difficulties with the river there, Patterson packed up some of the co-stars and crew and decided to just move to the source of the material where the action actually takes place, the Mountain Fork River in southeast Oklahoma.
But first the director needed several scenes with actual bees. That is where Brad and his wife, Karla Queen, come in.
“We didn’t tell anyone they were here. We gave them their privacy, but they were here for three months filming the bees and our bee yard. They also just loved how Burke’s Convenience Store looked and filmed a lot of it. Then, just before you come into Idabel, they filmed that empty property, and many places in the county they found interesting in Broken Bow and Idabel. I don’t know where all they went. They were a bit secretive too. They enjoyed their time here. We enjoyed them,” said Karla Queen.
“I think they liked the bees. What it was, the movie is about Kurt Russell, who has a special bee from Hawaii, a rare bee, which is stolen from him and taken down the Mountain Fork River. Then Kurt dies. It is up to his son Matthew and his foster daughter Angelina LookingGlass to search and get the queen back,” said Brad Queen.
The Queen bee yard
Because the Queens own 50 hives, they can harvest honey twice a year in the spring and the fall. When they have enough honey, they are able to can. Their honey brand is Two Queen Bees.
“Well, we have our honey in restaurants and stores all over the county. One day the director of this film was at a restaurant in Hochatown where our honey is sold. He asked who made that jar of honey? The owner told him how to contact us. They called my wife and asked if they could come out to set up a date to come out and meet me and see the bee yard,” said Brad Queen.
He wasn’t sure what they wanted; he had never really had anyone want to come and look over his bee yard before.
“Well, I thought he just wanted to come out and look at some bees. Like a tourist looking at a beehive. Then he told me what he wanted to do.
When the crew and director arrived at the Queen property, it must have been a surreal moment for the filmmakers. Brad described it like this.
“Karla and I had just harvested the honey. When you harvest honey, before you do, you put a super on the top. The worker bees fill the super up with honey,” said Brad Queen.
A super is short for superstructure. It is just another hive box, placed on top of the main hive. When the main hive is full of worker bees, a beekeeper knows when they are ready to store extra honey. They will put the super on top so they can harvest the honey. That way the honey in the main hive will stay there to feed the bees through the winter. In between the two boxes is an excluder, a thin piece of material which is big enough for the worker bees to get out.
“Well, we had just harvested the honey and took all the honey out of all of the wet supers. We put the supers on the fence where the wild bees can come and clean them out. When the film crew pulled up, there were a million wild bees swarming the supers and me. They were really amazed. Immediately they set up their equipment,” said Brad Queen.
They filmed Brad with the bees without a bee suit, and the bees swarming him.
“It was a neat scene; all you could see was me, the bees swarming, and one of the co-stars of the film,” said Brad Queen.
The movie crew had another idea. The director wanted Brad to hold a queen bee, an actual bee.
The premise of the movie is Kurt Russell’s character, who has a rare queen bee from Hawaii with a green dot on its back. The queen has been stolen and taken down the Mountain Fork River. His son, Mathew McConaughey’s character, and his stepdaughter, Angelia LookingGlass, are on a race against time to find her after Russell’s character’s death. Russell has put the bee in a bee box marked with a letter “K,” inside the box, covered with wax to hide the letter and disguise it.
“They had ordered this queen bee from Hawaii. Many professional beekeepers order their queens from Hawaii. They are a bit different looking, a little bigger. Then each year they are marked with a different color dot so the professional beekeepers will know her age. Queen bees can live up to five years. Well, professional beekeepers don’t want old queens, so they will kill them after two years old. I don’t kill my queens. Anyway, Andrew, the director, had the supers stacked up on both sides of me. I stood in between them. I didn’t have a bee suit. I was told in the movie they did it old school and no bee suits,” said Brad Queen.
First day of filming
On the first day of filming in Alabama, Brad was told that McConaughey, with no bee suit on, was stung in the middle of his eyeball, and it had shut down filming for three days.
According to Brad, a worker bee will sting someone and die, but a queen bee will sting you multiple times and not die.
“And she won’t sting anyone unless she gets really pissed off.
When it came time to shoot the scene, Brad was in position, and they handed him the bee; the bees were swarming.
“I am not a very good actor I decided. They took about 100 takes of that scene in all. Andrew would say to me, ‘Look at it. Look at it more slowly. Quicker, faster.’ The queen bee by that time had crawled all over me, and I felt her on the back of my leg, and I told them we were about on the last shot. About that time, she flew up in a circle and then back down into the honey super. I got down and looked and looked for her and never could find her. I wanted to keep her. I looked for her for days afterward, but no luck; she was gone, lost,” said Brad Queen.
Brad said that when a queen bee is alone with no worker bees to feed her, she withers and dies, and that was probably her fate.
Saying goodbye
Before the movie crew left after three months at Broken Bow, they took a few more scenes of the Mountain Fork River area, with other locals. Then they asked Brad Queen if he had any extra beehives.
“They took all the empty beehives I had about 100 and they painted them three different colors. They put all of them on different barges. They floated them down the river and filmed them,” said Brad Queen.
Together the couple learned a lot about the movie business and found it was really interesting.
“Everyone here was so nice. I was walking along the river and talking to one of the young men for a while and never realized he was one of the stars of the movie. He was so down to earth. All of them were,” said Karla Queen.
“I am looking forward to how all the scenes came out. And what parts of our area show up in the movie,” said Brad Queen.
“I hope people here are able to see the movie because there are so many landmarks here that they filmed. It has probably been a long time since a film crew from a major motion picture used the area as a backdrop for a movie. It is nice to have some positive fun news about the area,” said Karla Queen.
What it is like to be a beekeeper
“It was just a hobby I always wanted to get into. When I went and talked to a few people and just started with one hive,” said Brad Queen.
Today the couple harvests the honey twice a year; there is a spring and a fall harvest.
“I harvest my spring honey in June and my fall honey in November. There is quite a bit of difference between the two. Spring honey is very light in color, while the fall honey is the goldenrod honey. Spring honey is from all of the spring flowers blooming and things. The fall honey is from a lot of different things,” said Queen.
He mentioned that each year the honey tastes different, and the honey also tastes different between spring and fall.
“It tastes different each year, because no telling where the bees go. They will go to see different flowers. Or different flowers will bloom. Each one gives the honey a different taste and color,” said Queen.
“There are different buds on different plants and trees and things during the fall, which the fall honey harvest comes from,” said Karla Queen.
“During the winter months, the bees usually have enough honey stored in their hive to feed themselves to make it through the winter,” said Karla Queen.
“If they don’t, I will give them some sugar water if they need it. Like if it is a particularly hard winter,” said Brad Queen.
“When you go to harvest the honey, the bees will swarm into multiple, double, and make a new queen. The new queen will kill t
he others and take half the workers. Then that is how your bee yard grows. You then still have the older queen and half the workers too; each time you harvest, they swarm again and double once again,” said Brad Queen.
He also goes out on calls; if someone has a beehive in an attic, or a tree in their yard, he will help to capture and relocate them.
He said once you see a queen bee, you will know, because she is quite larger than the other bees.
“Like I mentioned, I don’t kill my queens. I let them be as long as they live. But the worker bees could burn them up. Sometimes when the worker bees see the queen bee is on the downslide, failing to lay eggs as much as before, they will kill her. They will cook her to death. They swarm her inside the hive in a ball, buzzing a thousand degrees inside. Bees are very cutthroat,” said Brad Queen.
The couple mentioned that, like anything else, honeybees have predators. Bee predators include dragonflies and, surprisingly, butterflies.
“One can go into a bee yard in the springtime, and there will be dragonflies flying all around, and they will kill the bees; same with the butterflies. In the old days, beekeepers used to pay boys ten cents to knock them down with their slingshots to protect the bees; it was that bad. They want that honey. All types of birds are predators too,” said Brad Queen.
Brad said he had three rules when it comes to using a bee smoker and bees.
“One is whenever you’re fooling with your bees, smoke your bees. The second rule is don’t work your bees without smoking your bees. And I won’t say the third rule. If you don’t smoke your bees, it is a nightmare to work with them. You have heard of killer bees; well, these aren’t killer bees, but they will be mad bees, and if they are filmed during the time they are mad, they will look like a ball of swarming mad killer bees chasing someone. When you smoke your bees, the smoke calms them down. They think it is a forest fire; they smell the smoke. They go and eat and get ready to leave the forest,” said Brad Queen.
If someone is interested in getting into the beekeeping business or just as a hobby, he said there are many places one can go on the Internet and order bees.
“You can purchase 200 bees in a three-pound sack. The queen will be in a separate one, and then packed inside a box. When they arrive, you must be patient. Put them in your hive and slowly introduce them to one another. Or you can order what is called a nuke. It is a mini beehive. It comes with 250 worker bees, a queen, and they have already been introduced, and there is pollen in the hive. But you can’t have them delivered through the mail,” said Brad Queen.
The nuke has to be picked up in another state.
“Most of the time it is the south Texas area or Louisiana. I haven’t found anywhere closer,” said Brad Queen.
Overall, what began as just a little hobby has given them both memories they won’t soon forget.
“It’s exciting to know that there were a lot of scenes shot around our county. Many on the Mountain Fork River with the aid of Greg and Darla Grant. Many different locations and businesses.”
“That was a cool experience and very neat to watch them work with all the lights and such,” said Darla Grant.
“Be sure to watch the trailer of this film. It really looks like an awesome movie. I can’t wait to watch it. Who would have thought Brad’s beekeeping hobby would have him connected to a movie? Great memories.”
