Professor Norman E Gary is the rare academic who plays clarinet while he is covered with live bees, and often in public.

An emeritus professor of apiculture at the University of California (Davis), Gary also plays Dixieland music in a human ensemble called the Beez Kneez Jazz Band. He generally goes solo for the bee-encrusted gigs.

Hollywood has used Gary's bee-wrangling talents, though seldom his clarinet, in more than a dozen movies. Among them: The X Files; Fried Green Tomatoes; Invasion of the Bee Girls; and Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh.

Several of Gary's scientific activities involve vibration, a general physics phenomenon of which music is just a part. Gary has microwaved bees. He has also analysed one of the lesser-known (to most humans) sounds that bees produce. Details appear in a monograph published with colleague SS Schneider in 1984 in the Journal of Apicultural Research. They gave their article the title "Quacking": A Sound Produced By Worker Honeybees After Exposure To Carbon Dioxide.

Gary has published more than 100 academic papers, many of them about bees. In one of the earliest, called The Case of Utter vs Utter, he took a fond look back at a court case decided in 1901 in Goshen, New York, starring two brothers from the Utter family.

The brothers disagreed – Utterly, of course – about many things. The question here was: did the bees associated with one brother, a beekeeper, eat the peaches growing on trees owned by the other brother, a fruit grower? Perhaps the most enjoyable account appeared soon after the trial, in the Rocky Mountain bee journal. The anonymous writer says: "It was amusing to see the plaintiff try to mimic the bee, on the witness stand as he swayed his head from one side to the other, raised up on his legs and flopped his arms. His motions were so utterly ridiculous and so contrary to the real acts and achievements of the bees, that everyone in the courtroom, including the jury, laughed, and laughed heartily."

The court ruled against that Utter, and for the other. This established a legal precedent favorable to wandering bees. It also inspired, almost 60 years later, the young Gary as he began his more-than-60-year-long career of collaborating with and studying tiny, honey-making musicians.

Thanks to David Kessler for bringing this to my attention.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize