This is definitely a review I didn’t actually need to do, but in the interests of being thorough I need to do it. A conundrum. So I did it.

The Beekeeper who appeared on the show Rugrats doesn’t actually even appear on the show Rugrats. The man in the picture is not the Beekeeper in question, that is Chas. Chas is the father of one of the titular Rugrats. He is a widower and, at this point in the show at least, he’s dating a lot, trying to find someone to have a relationship with. In this episode he goes on a series of bad dates, one of which is a beekeeper who wants to give him a tour of her hives. Chas is a nervous sort, so he brings a first aid kit on the date with him, in case of being stung. After we see Chas leave for this date we don’t see him again until he’s being set up with a different woman, with us seeing nothing of the apiary or the woman in question. So we know almost nothing about this Beekeeper.

She’s willing to date a single father, which is nice, but for a first date she just brings him to see her hives. Does this prove she cares about her bees so much that she’s showing them off? Or at least that she puts so much work in that she can’t take the time away to go elsewhere for this date? Does the date go horribly wrong with the bees attacking Chas? Does it go wrong because there’s simply no chemistry between the two? Or does it go right, but she decides she can’t be with Chas because of her devotion to the job? There’s so many possibilities and I just don’t have any evidence to go on. It’s almost like this is a character I’m being ridiculous by reviewing at all!

From what I can tell by looking at descriptions of the series, I don’t think that true supernatural stuff is commonplace in the world of Rugrats, so I can’t give this mystery woman the benefit of the doubt of maybe being a magical Beekeeper. Maybe she’s good at fighting and adventures, but we simply don’t know. Gonna have to go with a “normal beekeeper” rating.

Two Honeycombs out of Five.

Reviews like this one I can really point to when I want to prove I’m the world’s foremost reviewer of Fictional Beekeepers. Plus they’re really easy to write.

Once again I’m seeking to speed up the process of working through all the Gurxian animals I’ve drawn by posting a bunch of them that aren’t connected by any single region.

Iakeab

A species of nocturnal predator that hunts in the dense forests of Gurx, the Iakeab are stealthy creatures with excellent lowlight vision and a tendency to grab onto their prey and just hang onto it until it tires itself out. Iakeab like to build nests in the rotting remains of vegetation.

Uuggovoau

Uuggovoau are a grasslands species that has specialized in eating nests of smaller animals, especially small Vootuph that live in tunnels in the dirt. Their claws are perfect for digging open the tunnels and they can insert their long Rel to catch their prey.

Simauginis

Living in the shallow waters near shorelines, Simauginis are soft-tissues filter-feeders that walk along the sands in the day, and burrow into it at night. If they are divided into chunks, each can grow into a full-grown Simauginis over time. This, and their rapid reproductive rate, makes them a plentiful food source for a variety of predators.

Otyanoa

Large, aquatic creatures with eyes on stalks, the Otyanoa are docile and often farmed by Strondovarians in cooler oceanic regions. It is generally assumed that Otyanoa would be extinct if not kept by Strondos, so they’re treated as an example of the Strondos’ mastery over shaping their planet.

Tesses

The flying Vootuph species called Tesses fill the same niche on Gurx that honeybees do on Earth. They fly around collecting the Gurxian equivalent of pollen and turning it into a honeylike substance called Vaumian. And yes, there are Strondovarians who care for Tesses colonies to farm that Vaumian, the Gurxian equivalent of beekeepers.

Imbaukla

Another predatory species from the dense forests, the hindmost limbs of the Imbaukla have curled forward into limbs used to move the detritus that gathers at the forest floor to flush out smaller animals to eat. Imbaukla are tall creatures, standing as high as an adult Strondovarian, with eyes that can move independently to help them spot prey to grasp with their sticky Rel.

Oaushaue

A flightless species related to the Glounaph line, the Oaushaue are nearly endangered and now only exist in captivity. This has made all three-hundred and seven remaining Oaushaue extremely notable and they are prized possessions of famous individuals and organizations. It is good luck for the Oashaue, at least, that their captors want to take care of them, lest they lose their status symbol.

Professor Eustacius Jericho, the Scourge of Scoundrels, is not the first Beekeeper I’ve covered that comes from the Doctor Who franchise. That would be Goronwy Jones. But Jericho comes closer than his predecessor to becoming an actual Companion of the titular Doctor.

Jericho was a British soldier in the Second World War, and saw many terrible things. When he returned home, he threw himself wholly into academic life, seeking largely (consciously or otherwise) to be detached from the “real world” because of the darkness he’d seen. By the 1960s, he had some rapport with the people of his village, but avoided close attachments. And, because science often pairs well with the keeping of bees, it was in this era that seems to have taken it up. We don’t know how many hives he had, but we know he liked to use their honey in tea. “Nature’s own shock remedy,” he called it. I suspect he found it useful treating his trauma left from the War.

When supernatural events barged into Jericho’s life, he doubted them at first, but his scientific rationale quickly caught him up. Even in dangerous situations, he hoped to continue researching and learning. And when he wound up stranded in the early 1900s with the Doctor’s Companions, he and they went on a years-long, world-spanning quest to help prevent the end of the world. And when that crisis came to its climax, he allowed himself to be captured by an alien army as part of the plan to bring them down. The plan worked, though Jericho didn’t make it back alive. He was, at least, happy in the end that after his sedentary decades, he got to have a big adventure in his final years.

The only problem is that we never got to see Jericho doing any Beekeeping. We only get that one reference to his bees’ honey. Certainly he couldn’t have been doing it after being stranded in the past and started travelling the world on a mission. That means that the part of Jericho’s life that is full of adventure and the part where he keeps bees are decidedly separate. That’s not the ideal situation I look for here in these reviews, and sadly that brings his rating down from what it otherwise could have been:

Three Honeycombs out of Five.

Time flows so quickly that I was surprised to learn that it has been more than two months since I officially announced I was making a game called Surrounded By Danger. But in those two months, progress has continued and I can say that I think the basic mechanics of the game are nearly complete. There is only a little fine-tuning left to account for balancing issues and the like. Otherwise, this is a completely functional cooperative board game that I have playtested with four other people, not including myself. It genuinely works.

But, unfortunately/extremely fortunately, something has changed since the last time I wrote on the topic. I delved into research on other cooperative board games and learned a lot about what exists in the genre these days. What I learned changed this project entirely: there are board games that now attempt to tell ongoing persistent stories. I got very into the idea, and I very much am now working on a Story Mode for Surrounded by Danger. It’s going well! I’ve even tested it! And while it may not be as developed as the basic mechanic yet, but it’s coming along.

Another bit of progress that has occurred is less good news. I had really, really wanted to release this game with the subtitle “An Urban Beekeeping Simulator” because it would greatly amuse me to do so. But cooler heads have convinced me that this would give potential players an incorrect view of what the game is about. Is it my fault that the populace at large doesn’t know that Beekeepers are all about fighting crime and investigating supernatural threats? No, I’ve done everything in my power to prove this to them. But the more people who come into the game, the more will learn about the greatness of Beekeepers, so I guess I should do this right.

Stinger Apini, played by Sean Bean, is a character from the film Jupiter Ascending. Without getting into the macro-level details of the movie’s sci-fi setting, I can say this much about Stinger: he’s a genetically-engineered space cop who has been demoted and posted on Earth where he lives with his daughter and keeps bees. And it does seem that he’s good at the beekeeping, a trait that may well bred into him at a genetic level. His farm not only has multiple hives, but the home is covered in still more honeycombs, apparently placed wherever the bees felt like it. From what we see, the bees have a lot of leeway on this farm.

It is definitely worth noting that the bees we see on Stinger’s farm have a certain supernatural style. They can sense royalty in a person, for example, and respond to that person’s actions, to the extent that they’ll attack bad guys to help protect the film’s main character. Stinger says, “bees are genetically designed to recognize royalty… bees aren’t like humans, they don’t question or doubt. Bees don’t lie.” But Stinger says this is true of all bees, not just his. If all this is just a fact of bees in this sci-fi world, I can’t give Stinger any credit for it.

What I can give Stinger credit for is that he’s also an excellent fighter with a long history in space battles. He even had wings up until he acted nobly (taking credit for the actions of a soldier under his command) and was punished for it. While this did result in his disgrace, and his anger over it (and his desire to protect his daughter) led to him betraying his allies, he came back around to rejoin the protagonists. He wasn’t so overcome with rage that it became a problem in the long run.

He’s definitely a skilled combatant and a decent beekeeper. Even his name, Stinger Apini, is cool and thematically appropriate. But look, I have to be honest. My own opinion of the very concept of royalty is working against Stinger in this review. The idea that being “royal” is not made-up bullshit but is, in fact, an actual quantifiable physical attribute of a person and makes them “better” than other people and that bees can recognize and defer to it… none of this gets PDR’s approval.

Three Honeycombs out of Five.