Linus Eckles is from an episode of NCIS: Origins, which is a the procedural cop show I guess exists.

Linus Ackles keeps bees. He’s a quiet detail-oriented type who keeps to himself mostly. He’s had some trouble with the law, has been to prison, but on the outside he mostly just cares for his bees and works on his little projects. One of his projects is a car bomb that he uses to kill a lawyer. That’s what gets the show’s cast involved in his business.

You see, Ackles believes he is on a mission from God. He was stalking this lawyer guy and discovered that he, a defender, was having an illicit affair with a prosecutor, which means that all the cases those two lawyered at each other were actually marred by a conflict of interest. Ackles thinks this is wrong, as per his mission from God, so he went all vigilante on them (with an eerie calmness, rather than Beekeeper Rage). The cops in the show are baffled at the idea that Ackles wants to right a wrong that happened to people he didn’t even know, but such it is. Ackles actually just saw that something unfair happened and he wants to remedy that.

Except for one thing: Ackles did know one of those people. One of the lawyer’s previous defendants, one who the lawyer failed, was in prison with Ackles and became a preacher in there. He was the one who got Ackles interested in God and he was the one who convinced Ackles to stalk the lawyer in the first place which allowed the affair to be discovered. This kinda removes any actual supernatural God intervention from Ackles’s mission, doesn’t it? The plan works, though. This guy gets set free because his case was declared a mistrial. I don’t know if this guy was a recurring character in the show or just there for one episode, but either way his freedom at the end shows that Ackles was a success.

Ackles does not get free. When the cops solve the mystery of the lawyer bombing they raid Ackles’s home and arrest him. Knowing they were coming, Ackles freed his bees so that they would be able to go on living while he went to jail, since he doesn’t deny his guilt in the slightest. He even apologizes on behalf of the bees if any of the cops got stung. The guy is just wholly bought in on the worthiness of his mission and caring for his bees.

Three Honeycomb out of Five. It’s a low three, but he just barely makes it, largely in part because when the preacher guy gets out of prison, a bee flies by as if checking in on him. It may not even be one of Ackles’s bees, but I take it as one and I say that this proves the hive is keeping an eye on the guy whose freedom was apparently worth that of their keeper. If this show wants to prove this bee is NOT doing that, well someone will just have to let me know.

Apparently there was an anthology horror show called Monsters that ran back in the days that I would have been most happy to watch it, yet I only learned it existed recently. Truly there is more media out there than any one person can pay attention to. But hey, once I found out there was an episode with a Beekeeper, you know I had to get in on it.

Homer P. Jimmerman is a very introverted man. He alludes to a phobia that keeps him in his apartment, which could be a fear of people or the outside world or who-knows-what. In any case, it is not a fear of bees, so to maximize his ability to stay inside, he operates a bee farm from inside his New York high rise apartment, the honey from which allows him to be utterly self-sustaining. And he succeeds at that!

He’s relatively new at beekeeping it seems, but creates a nearly perfect little ecosystem in his apartment complete with flowers and plants. He clearly cares for the bees and treats them well. He calls them his children and even plays them music in spite of the fact that he loathes music in all its forms (weird). The resulting honey is so delicious, and an aphrodisiac on top of that, that his neighbour forces himself to work as a business partner and it is extremely lucrative.

Also, somehow, he made a queen bee that could take human form.

That’s right. The situation that Jimmerman finds himself in is reminiscent of that Benedict Fields was in: a queen bee that can shapeshift into the form of a sexy human lady. Unlike Fields and his Queen, though, Jimmerman’s Queen does not love him and he does love her. She takes the name Desiree and poses as his fiance, but things don’t go well for him given she winds killing Jimmerman as soon as she feels he has outlived his usefulness. Then she mates with that neighbour/business partner guy (killing him as well). Desiree had plans that went well beyond the walls of Jimmerman’s apartment, so while he would have been happy to simply mate with her and die (got halfway there, pal!) she is off to spread her workers to the rest of the world.

Jimmmerman’s actual beekeeping is on a sci-fi level of impressiveness, but one of the things you don’t want is for the hive to turn against you, so he manages only Three Honeycomb out of Five. Also, for the record, Jimmerman gives a little speech where he spouts that stuff about the hive worshipping their queen, and it always annoys me to see this bit of anthropomorphism placed on bees, who do NOT worship their queen and the queen does NOT rule the hive. We claim that because we called them “queens” but if we called them “baby bee maker bees” or something we would understand that they provide a valuable role, but our human concepts of royalty need not apply.

It’s Cain! From the Bible! The show Supernatural kinda plays fast and loose with the stories it takes from the Bible, but the basics of the story of Cain and Abel are there. Cain killed his brother. The reasons may be different and the results may be different, but the core is still that. And, in the world of Supernatural, after Cain killed his brother, he was marked with his eponymous Mark and it kept him alive (even when he tried to kill himself) and drove him to kill more. He went from being a human to being a demon, and even served as the most powerful of the Knights of Hell. He didn’t like it, but he spent thousands of years. But he eventually got out. He fell in love with a human woman and, though it didn’t end well, he swore he’d never pick up his blade again. He retired and went off the grid. And what did he do next? He kept bees!

With the Mark of Cain functioning in a way not unlike Beekeeper Rage, it makes sense he’d find the occupation to his liking. He refers to keeping bees as “very relaxing” and expresses admiration for the animals themselves. It keeps him on the right path for more than a century, he seems to be good at it.Sadly, when he does, because of the plot of the show, take up killing again (specifically going after killers), we don’t see him keeping bees again.

In most ways Cain is as powerful as, say, Beorn was, and maybe moreso. He’s got all kinds of magic abilities. We’re told Cain is one of the most powerful demons in this show’s mythology. He could have rated very high, if he’d just not given up on the beekeeping so easily.

Four Honeycomb out of Five.

I have to note that, like Friar Tuck, Cain exists in the space of legend. Could the popular image of Cain grew so that him being a beekeeper became a well known facet of the tale? Well, it seems less likely to stick than it could for Tuck.

Today I have to grapple with something I should have done before now: the line between entomologist and beekeeper. I might as well do it in the form of a review of Professor Benedict O. Fields, who appeared in the Outer Limits episode called “ZZZZZ“.

Fields has bees that he keeps. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of time and they don’t have a traditional hive that we get to see, but they’re in his lab. And he isn’t harvesting their honey or anything, what Fields takes gathers is information. I’ve said before that science and beekeeping go together well, so keeping the bees to study them works fine for my purposes. Fields is an award-winning scientist with a reputation for perfectionism who has written books about medieval stories of bees and developed a machine that allows translation of bee language into English and vice versa. The man is devoted to bees. He doesn’t seem especially warm to them, and he never gives a speech about how great they are or anything, but comparing to his relationship with his wife I think it may just be because he’s an Early 1960s American Man than anything.

One other thing he did was to “accelerate” his bees to make his bees more intelligent. I don’t know if this was selective breeding or genetic tampering or exposing them to beetronic rays or whatever sci-fi method they could make up, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that through this uplifting of the species, he caused his own doom. The Queen of his smart bees fell in love with him and the hive were intelligent enough that they had her take human form to seduce him. They were smart enough to have their queen take human form! The acceleration that Fields did to these bees is frankly miraculous.

Ben falls for the queen’s lies and allows her to become his lab assistant. He’s not interested in her in a romantic sense (completely monogamous this guy), but he’s an idiot if he didn’t understand that she was trying and he should have done something more about it. I get that he lost a child and wanted to fill that hole, but she’s not so clever as she seems to think she is. But then again, I guess what’s obvious to the audience isn’t always obvious to the characters. I guess I can give Fields the benefit of the doubt that he’s not a complete idiot. Anyway, after the Queen kills his wife as part of her plan, he finally rejects her forcefully enough to put an end to it.

So, yes. I’m going to say that Fields “keeps bees” enough to count as a Fictional Beekeeper. He cares enough about them to devote his life to them and invent sci-fi stuff for them. He’d rank higher if he cared enough to KEEP more, but he still keeps.

Three Honeycomb out of Five. Though, honestly, after the events of the episode I have to assume he probably gave it up.

Here’s the inside of my head:

I’m trying to teach myself to be good at making pixel art (I’ve always maintained it was an unconscionable failure that I didn’t make Adventure Dennis in pixel art), so I kinda drew a stream-of-consciouness piece. The results are full of PDR-ness, so I thought I’d make some annotations:

• To begin, the colour scheme is basically that of this website (more orangey than yellow, but close), which I’ll have had for 20 years this year. It’s a pretty important part of my life, even if after all that time I don’t think I’ve managed to make of it what I want it to be. But I’m still going here in this Internet age of social media, how many websites from 2006 can say that?
• It’s a cityscape. None of the buildings here are specific references, really, but PDR is definitely cityfolk and likes tall buildings. I tried to work in a garden of flowers on the rooftop near the beekeeper, but I sucked at drawing it, so instead we have a cityscape that doesn’t show as much nature as I’d like, but I can pretend that’s there and just enjoy the cityness of it.
• I mentioned the beekeeper, and that’s another very PDR thing. Remember when the Internet was a little more innocent and people got into debates about Pirates versus Ninjas? Well, PDR decided he had to be kooky and special and different and chose Beekeepers. But you can’t say I didn’t commit. I have become the world’s foremost reviewer of Fictional Beekeepers, after all. The Beekeeper in the image could be Adam Obianu, my own badass fictional beekeeper, but it doesn’t really matter, it’s just the concept of Beekeepers.
• The person with the beekeeper is nobody in particular, but I’ve come to think that if this is, as I joked, the inside of my head, that’s probably my own self image. Certainly it doesn’t look like me physically, since I’m a big masc oaf, but I do think that if I could choose my physical form at will something smaller and more feminine would be likely, since I already feel like I take up more space than I’d like and I am not especially manly by the standards of society. And she’s friends with the beekeeper. I like friends and I like beekeepers.
• The building the beekeeper and figure are standing on has a little occult symbol on there. I mostly just enjoy designing symbols that look occult (I did it in The Demon of South Gloria as a recent example), but the one in the image I have designed with a story in mind that I’ve not yet managed to tell.
• To the lower left of that occult symbol you can see Mackestry Manor, home to Many Monsters and setting of activity books I’ve made for sale on the Internet. I’ve not had the energy to make more recently, but I intend to get back there at some point.
• On a building overlooking the Manor is a little creature called a skeffix. This little guy comes from a one-page RPG I made as part of a Game Jam, and is standing in for my desire to create games. I mean, I technically HAVE created games, Skeffix for example, but I’d like to have the time to really refine and produce one that I could sell to the world. Maybe this’ll be the year.
• Above the skeffix is my attempt at a duck flying by. I purposely made to attempt to make this accurate to any species of duck because, once again, this is a self-reference. Back before emails and stuff, when I used to send letters to friends, I would occasionally just end them with “and here’s a picture of a duck” and do a little doodle of a duck. It was never meant to be high art, it was meant to be PDR’s way of ending a letter. I just like ducks. Here’s one time I made a Snow Duck.
• To the right of the duck you’ll see some sort of UFO-looking thing, but that’s actually the Hover Headquarters, home to Hover Head and the Team of Superheroes, the stars of a comic I made years and years ago. As far as this image is concerned, that floating base stands in for all my webcomics, including the likes of the insufferable Comical Comedy Rabbit Comics, or the Phone Guys, which has somehow had over 800 strips at this point. The fact that the two comics I have that are still ongoing are the ones I’ve intentionally made difficult is not lost on me. I really ought to revisit Hover Head and try to make a comic that actually works.
• Behind the Hover Headquarters one will note a massive sphere in the sky. That certainly isn’t the sun, PDR doesn’t enjoy the sun enough to include that particular massive sphere. While making the drawing, I got it into my head that this city is on a moon around a gas giant world. No real reason for that beyond my general love of science fiction, but that still counts.
• And finally, streaking across the sky, is a little spaceship designed by none other than PDR at some point under age ten. I don’t remember exactly when, but in elementary school I made a little spaceship design out of some construction toys and I still have it. I use an image of me as a child as my profile image on pretty much all social media because I want that kid’s dreams to come true. And that includes that spaceship. Like the occult symbol, I have a story in mind for that spaceship, and I hope to tell it someday.