“He is a skin-changer: sometimes he is a huge black bear, sometimes he is a great strong black-haired man with huge arms and a great beard [. . .] He lives in an oak-wood and has a great wooden house; and as a man he keeps cattle and horses which are nearly as marvellous as himself. They work for him and talk to him. He does not eat them; neither does he hunt or eat wild animals. He keeps hives and hives of great fierce bees, and lives most on cream and honey. As a bear he ranges far and wide.”

That is Gandalf the Grey’s description of Beorn, today’s Beekeeper. Beorn is a character in the Hobbit, and there’s no getting around it: this is one awesome beekeeper. With such an open-and-shut case for beekeeper greatness, it’s a good chance for me to look at what I consider when I rate a apiarist.

First, there’s the general quality of their beekeeping skills. Beorn apparently keeps a large area of bee pastures, and his bees “were bigger than hornets. The drones were bigger than your thumb, a good deal, and the bands of yellow on their deep black bodies shone like fiery gold.” Whatever Beorn is doing, it’s working. He’s got healthy bees and plenty of ’em. He also knows how to work with bee-products: he is noted as having “red beeswax candles” and he knows how to make “twice baked cakes that would keep good a long time, and on a little of which [one] could march far” with honey. He’s a good beekeeper.

Second, are they badass? A beekeeper needs to know how to fight. Today’s guy certainly is: “Beorn was a fierce enemy” the text tells us, and it sounds true: he is a “huge man with a thick black beard and hair, and great bare arms and legs with knotted muscles [and] a large ax.” But we can’t go too far into this element of beekeeper reviewing without brushing up against the next, because next…

Next comes the matter of supernatural powers. They don’t have to be actually “supernatural” in nature, they can be technologically based or whatever, but a great beekeeper needs something that sets it apart from mere mortals. For starters, Beorn can turn to a freaking bear. He’s apparently massive in both human and bear form, so he has the advantages of two separate powerful forms. It seems he prefers fighting in bear-form, though. Check out some quotes from the Battle of the Five Armies:

• “But even with the Eagles they were still outnumbered. In that last hour Beorn himself had appeared – no one knew how or from where. He came alone, and in bear’s shape; and he seemed to have grown almost to giant-size in his wrath.”
• “The roar of his voice was like drums and guns; and he tossed wolves and goblins from his path like straws and feathers.”
• “[N]othing could withstand him, and no weapon seemed to bite upon him. He scattered the bodyguard, and pulled down Bolg himself and crushed him.”

Beorn essentially won that battle. But don’t go thinking that being a bear is Beorn’s only skill. He can also talk to animals, all types of animals, and they like him well enough that they help him out around the house. That’s a sweet deal.

The final element to consider is, how do they handle the Beekeeper Rage? It’s a constant problem and Beorn is no exception. Before dropping in for their unannounced visit, Gandalf warns his comrades: “He can be appalling when he is angry, though he is kind enough if humoured. Still I warn you he gets angry easily.” And that’s how it is. He is angry, but if you can get past it, he is a pretty good guy. At first he doesn’t trust the protagonists, since they are strangers to him, but once he checks out their story “Beorn was most jolly for a change; indeed he seemed to be in a splendidly good humour and set them all laughing with his funny stories.” It is Beorn’s good luck that he exists in a fantasy world in which objectively evil people exist, so he can channel his Beekeeper Rage into mostly productive areas like Goblin removal.

So that’s it. I, as an expert, am able to give or take some ratings based on certain intangible qualities, my gut instincts or just a “certain something” that a character may possess, but the above metric is the most reliable way to tell how good a beekeeper is. So where does that leave us with Beorn?

“Beorn indeed became a great chief afterward in those regions and ruled a wide land between the mountains and the wood; and it is said that for many generations the men of his line had the power of taking bear’s shape, and some were grim men and bad, but most were in heart like Beorn, if less in size and strength. In their day the last goblins were hunted from the Misty Mountains and a new peace came over the edge of the Wild.”

Holy smokes.

Five Honeycombs out of Five. He’s top of the line.

Trigona Ambrose is a character in a webcomic called Beeserker. It’s a very surreal sort of strip wherein some Sciencemen decide to create a robot powered by bees. Such a quest requires a lot of bees, and Trigona is the beekeeper who supplies them. So now that robot, the titular Beeserker, considers Trigona its mother figure and she’s got some bizarre friends to drag her into bizarre adventures. Most of the beekeepers I’ve reviewed so far have appeared once or twice and then their story was done, but Trigona is still appearing in an ongoing comic, so she’s still “active” if you will.

Called “Beegirl” by the Sciencemen, in many instances Trigona comes across as a voice of reason in the strip. But that is only because of how insane everyone and everything else is there. Trigona’s role as a bee-seller is, she admits, not typical of a beekeeper, but she’s bored with her life and doesn’t care much about the well-being of her bees. Considering her method of beekeeping seems to be entirely based around shooting them with a flamethrower made of a bear’s head (the Ursinerator), selling them as a fuel source is pretty consistent.

The Ambrose family is the latest branch of a long lineage of beekeepers, apparently. That is appropriately mythic. Her parents have been seen in the strip. Her father is Meliponini, who wielded the Ursinerator before Tringona. Her mother is Queenie, who seems to have the strongest bee control in the family (she is the queen after all) and apparently smoke-control. It’s very clear that in the universe of this comic, beekeepers are the supernatural force I’ve been saying they were all along.

So let’s run down the beekeeping powers Trigona has displayed so far: She’s got an antennae headband that allows her to translate “all bee languages”. She’s got goggles that allow her to track bee energies. The Ursinerator, of course, is a pretty cool flamethrower, but it also flies and functions as a phone. She even has transformation sequences to help her get dressed. In the Beeserker video game, she can double-jump. The Bee-Dome in which she lives, has some handy self-regenerative powers. She has a bit of a weakness for glue-fume-instigated hallucinations, but for the most part that’s a very impressive set of abilities. She’s held her own in many a fight and the fact that’s she’s got so many bees to sell indicates at least some success at keeping her colony active. Though I’d almost bet the bee-dome is self sufficient enough that it’d keep a good colony even if there were no Ambroses there at all.

Four Honeycombs out of Five. Very strong in the adventuresome aspects of the profession, but less so in the beekeeping parts.

You can just watch this one for yourself, why not? It isn’t even five minutes long.

What we have here is Beekeeper Rage in action, right before our very eyes. Reginald, portrayed by John Cleese, is being interviewed by an interviewer, played by Rowan Atkinson, and it all goes downhill from there. As you can see for yourself, Reginald Prawnbaum is a very renowned beekeeper. So much so that he gets to appear on television! Television! If that’s not a measure of success, I don’t know what is. Reginald starts out very composed and together but less than five minutes later and he’s lost the constant struggle that rages in the heart of every beekeeper.

We learn quite a bit about poor Reginald in that time. He’s been a beekeeper for “over forty years” and whose love of bees began as a child. He kept notes about what kinds of flowers the bees visited even then. As a child! This is a man with so many experience points devoted to his beekeeping stats that I assume when he is among his swarms he is like unto a demigod. He’s not got much experience dealing with idiotic interviewers, though.

I mean, the interviewer is an idiot. I think there might even be some malice behind it. Are his tics real? I can’t actually be sure that this was a calculated attempt to discredit a beekeeper live on television, but the possibility exists.

But does the possibility that the interviewer is actively goading Reginald, or even the certainty that he’s extremely annoying, justify the wrath that Reginald brings down on him? Well, making him run around until he falls off the stage, that’s not so bad. Shooting him? That’s a touch more than necessary.

How good a beekeeper is Reginald? Well, we don’t see him do any beekeeping. I can (and do) assume he’s got all kinds of supernatural powers and fighting ability. But it isn’t just his stated beekeeping experience that make me suspect it. It’s the gun. Where does Reginald get the gun? Why does he have it at this interview? If you say he has it because it is funny, you’re missing the point of overthinking fictional beekeepers. If you’re PDR you realize there are two possibilities: Either he just carries around a gun because he’s the type who needs a gun on a regular basis because he’s fighting mobsters or something, or he just straight up summoned a gun from the ether (maybe he had his bees bring it to him instantly during the moment of darkness?). Either scenario means one thing: Reginald Prawnbaum is a badass beekeeper.

Three Honeycombs out of Five. I’m certain this guy is extremely powerful, but he unfortunately loses points for the Rage.