A middle-aged man in central Vietnam’s Quang Nam Province has spent 40 years mending raincoats, while another in the Central Highlands province of Dak Lak risks his life hunting for highly poisonous hornets as their means of livelihood.

The seasonal raincoat fixer

Nguyen Van Sy, 55, has patched up raincoats’ holes or rips at a market along the Hoai River in Quang Nam Province’s Hoi An City for 40 years.

At 15, while working as a load porter at the market, he taught himself the raincoat patching skill, he recalled.

Back in the 1980s, as most people remained poor, the raincoat was quite a valuable item.

They didn’t discard even the tattered raincoats but brought them to Sy. Several got patched up up to dozens of times.

“I could earn a living and provide for my two children with the job until the thin, convenient raincoats became popular. People now tend to throw away their cheap slickers rather than having them fixed up,” Sy shared.

A raincoat now costs from one dollar to around US$20 for luxury, durable ones.

Sy hangs up a wooden board that funnily read “Patching up submarine raincoats,” as his patches are so skillfully made that the fixed raincoats are as water-resistant as submarines.

Sy’s simple tools include finely split wood, charcoal and a bore.

As he places a nylon patch of the same texture and color with the slicker over the hole and another nylon piece on top of it, he adheres the patch onto the raincoat with the heated bore.

He charges from VND2,000 to 10,000 (up to half a US dollar) for each mend.

“Very few practice the job now. In this city, only I still do it, and I mostly have clients in the rainy season,” Sy added.

The man, who lives alone at the tent where he fixes the slickers, now carries loads for stall owners at the market for supplementary incomes.     The hornet hunter

Nguyen Van Toan, who lives in Dak Ha District in the Central Highlands province of Kon Tum, boasts the skill of hunting for hornets with his bare hands and no protective gear.

Hornets, or killer bees, are known for their capacity to knock down a full-grown buffalo with some 10 stings, and kill a human adult with only two or three stings without timely medical attention.

His simple tools are spades, rice husk, smoke pipes, and the expertise he has garnered from hunting for forest bees for dozens of years.

While people mostly hunt honey bees, Toan shared his exceptional skills have helped him catch the venomous insect and stay safe from their stings.

His hands are riddled with scars from their stings.

Toan shared he got stung several times from hunting the insect for years, but the medicinal herbs in the forest saved his life. He passed out in the forest for around half an hour before coming around and hobbling back home.

The bee hunter said he brings home hornets on an almost everyday basis.

Tracking down to the hornets’ hives amidst the forest is also a challenge.

Toan revealed the insects generally fly singly to flowering areas to prey on smaller bees and insects.

He uses a sharp twig and ties a small insect onto it as prey. The prey is also strapped to a thread.

As a hornet grabs the prey and hovers into the air, Toan observes its flight direction and follows in that direction to find the hives.

The master hunter said the approach has rarely failed him. 

When he locates the hives, he blows smoke into them to incapacitate the queen bees and catches the young ones, which are then sold to be made into alternative medicine.

After losing consciousness for some 10 minutes, the queen bees will come around and stay healthy and fertile.

The elderly honey bee trappers

Unlike Toan who hunts hornets for a living, a number of people, mostly elderly ones, in Huong Khe District in central Ha Tinh Province trap forest honey bees and farm them at home as a hobby.

Rain or shine, they place traps atop electric poles along the roads and provincial highway No. 17, which is near the Vietnam- Laos border.

65-year-old Trinh Xuan Dao, who has hunted forest honey bees for several years now, shares though there’re times when he can’t lure any hive in a month, he remains undaunted.

He lures the insects simply by making artificial hives from hollow tree trunks, burning joss sticks which smell of honey fragrance as decoy and rounding up the bees into his hives with some scoops.

Dao revealed swarms of bees habitually leave the forests at the end of October when it turns cold, which is the best time for the bee trappers.

He once lured a hive of around 1,000 bees.

When he saw a bee approaching his hive, he knew for sure a big swarm would soon turn up, as the bee will return to its current hive and signal the swarm to follow it to the new hive.

After around 30 minutes when all the bees swarmed into his hive, Dao shielded the hive’s holes to keep the insects from escaping.

He refused to sell the hive and brought it home.

Some trappers are in their 70s and 80s. They farm the trapped bees at home and collect their honey to share among their relatives and friends.

Despite his decrepit age, Nguyen Thanh Xuan, 83, still gathers a group of like-minded friends to trap forest bees from October to December each year.

Xuan shared he wakes up early every day to place the traps on electric poles in different communes, and keeps constant watch over them, patiently waiting for the bees to be trapped.

Bees generally live for around 45 days, while the queen bees can reach a lifespan of three years.

According to 60-year-old Phan Thanh Toan, who also traps forest bees as a hobby, a trapped bee hive usually fetches around VND500,000 ($23), but few sell them.

There’re around 10 pastime bee trappers in each of the district’s border communes including Huong Vinh, Huong Lien and Huong Xuan.

Bui Thuc Ngoc, director of the district’s Science Transfer Center, said honey bees are getting considerably harder to come by.

Large trees each used to boast up to more than 10 hives, which yield dozens of liters of honey.

Trapped bees now need care for quite a while before they can produce honey, he noted.