For more than 50 years, during pleasant spring and summer days in northwest Eden Prairie, Norb Gernes could often be found doing what he loved to do: lingering near the hum of his backyard hives, watching honeybees lift off and return as if they were clocking in for a shift.
With increasing age and declining health, Gernes — Eden Prairie’s oldest residential beekeeper — is handing the craft to a new caretaker: his nephew, Sam Kryzer.
Gernes’ beekeeping story began not too far from Eden Prairie. In the 1960s, he was a young Catholic priest in southern Minnesota when he met another priest who kept bees…