Joxe Leunda, one of Gipuzkoa's beekeepers, dies
- At the age of 82, Joxe Leunda Agirre died (Urretxu, 1937), one of the referents of the Association of Beekeepers of Gipuzkoa and very esteemed among the baserritars of the EHNE of the Goierri, a man from the Abertzale left. Joxe has fallen into a disease that has led him from being a good old man to a great degeneration in a year and a half. Proven by the pain that globalization has torn our bees first with the mite and recently with the Asian wasp, it has gone silently as if it had not wanted to wait for the Covid-19 that has now spread among us.
Born in the middle of civil war in Urretxu's Deskarga, Joxe was buried in a family of seven brothers. Anyone who wants to know how he lived then in the villages of the Guipuzkoan Goierri will be able to hear Leunda's experiences among the testimonies collected by the web Ahotsak.eus.
When he was young, fate wanted to lose his right hand in an accident at work and yet until almost time of death we met Joxe in wooden work, with a hammer or other instrument adapted to the right wrist as with the left hand. One of the icons of the beekeepers of Gipuzkoa has been the pompous time built by Him in a beautiful high of Urretxu, in a place called Paxkaxio Field, in empty wood for his bees.
One of the most veteran members of the Association of Beekeepers of Gipuzkoa, Luis Mari Intza, died in October 2018 in a de facto couple in the area of bees together with the oñatiarra Tolosarra Luis Mari Intza, with whom he met on the front line and suffered several times as the sweetest times of the association. Leunda used to say with a small smile on the projects of both if Intza "was responsible for external relations", that it was she who had to do the practical work, turn the experiments into a revelation, which in Spanish called with its double meaning "field work". This is how Leunda baseritarra participated in the work of promoting apitherapy in the Basque Country and bringing apiterated to the world, especially in Latin America, Hugo Aguirre, Julio César Díaz and other doctors.
After promoting the native Black Bee, preferably foreign breeds, for a dozen years he organized a special experiment with Intza to take one more step: after the beekeeping of the last century and a half made us grow in size, help Apis Mellife reduce it to its original measurements. The ARGIA theme summarized in 2008 "Who decided to increase the small bee?" in the chronicle. The small bee, which in itself is our Black Bee, helps to return to the original measures, as it is a minority option in beekeeping it is a subject elaborated by several qualified beekeepers, as explained in that article. It was Intza that found a track to start in Gipuzkoa in the Canary Islands: The German beekeeper Stephan Braun is one of the first to broadcast in Spanish and has a great deal of information on the subject.
If someone has known what it is to miss the effort and resume the work until a solution is reached, it has been Joxe Landa. Both have experienced the search for a small bee more than with a small bee in the hives organized in their lands and in those of their friends and family, in Urretxu, Oñati and others. Finally, in 2018, Joxe sought to gather what he experienced and learned during the dozen previous years in a paper that, accompanied by an apiarist journalist, finally handed over to the Association of Beekeepers of Gipuzkoa in early 2019, for understanding that the issue is of great importance for beekeepers but even more so for the survival of our Black Bee, that is to say for the pollination of trees, matorals.
In the past year, Joxe Leunda suffered a rapid decline in his health, until he died at the age of 82. Those of us who for months have been lucky enough to be with him, we will remember, among the confusion, how from time to time he illuminated Joxe like a lightning bolt, with enough clarity to tell him how the joke he had heard from another began and ended. -The doctor came and said to me on the farewell: - To see when we see each other again! And I said, "And if it doesn't, it's not for me." Always Joxe's Uncle!
As a pioneer beekeeper, the cuckoo has not been wrong in the last year: Since 2019, a working group has been set up at the Association of Beekeepers of Gipuzkoa to open the small bee and start testing it. This working group has received the bees of Leunda and also some valuable materials with which the family has donated. In the past, Joxe is reinforcing and multiplying the small bee hives that this year will become a couple dozen colonies that have been fed by the beekeepers of the working group. The protection of grandchildren who have cared more sweetly than their father and the group of young beekeepers who continued their work -- I wouldn't have wanted a better farewell.
