Spidey Super Stories was a segment on a television show called the Electric Company that featured live-action Spider-Man stuff. If you want, you can see the appearance of the Beekeeper on the Youtube. To summarize: there is a villain named the Queen Bee who wants to conquer the world. Spider-Man is opposing her. One of her henchmen is: The Beekeeper. Spider-Man beats the Beekeeper very easily.

He seems like a relatively ordinary guy. Queen Bee and her other henchmen are some kind of half-bee people, and one of the bees in Queen Bee’s hive is named Fang and is said to be “poison” (I assume they mean “venomous”). But the Beekeeper is just a normal human, it seems. And henching? I mean, not to disparage henchmen, but that is definitely a step down from being a regular beekeeper.

Issue #14 of the Spidey Super Stories comic adapts this story, and it isn’t much different. Queen Bee does once refer to him as “the Royal Beekeeper”, but that ain’t what it says on his shirt, so it surely doesn’t count.

One Honeycombs out of Five. Man. I gotta find some more badass beekeepers sometime soon.

Fullan is a beekeeper who lives in the country of Kyrat, which is the setting of the game Far Cry 4. She was living her peaceful life there until the Royal Army (the game’s bad guys) discovered that there was gold on her property and kicked her off so they could have it for themselves. As the bad guys prepare to destroy Fullan’s hives with a flamethrower, she gets the game’s protagonist to go kill them all.

Fictional beekeeper aficionados (so, basically just me) will notice that this is almost exactly the same deal as Holofernus Meiersdorf. An open world game where a beekeeper is in danger and needs the hero’s help. It should come as no surprise that I, the guy who is trying to spread word that beekeepers are badasses, am not a big fan of that. Still, Fullan was probably perfectly good at being a “normal” beekeeper, and I like to think that when she gets her land back all that gold helps her become even better off. But still, man. Not a big help to my ongoing thesis here.

Two Honeycombs out of Five.

Lord Marmaduke Ffogg is a minor Batman villain who is also a beekeeper. Sounds like a pretty good combination, but unfortunately Ffogg is a bit of a letdown. You see, rather than using beekeeping as the theme of his crimes, Ffogg’s theme is fog. He does, admittedly, make good use of that theme. He lives in a town called “Fogshire” and he’s got a Pipe of Fog that billows forth enough fog to cover his crimes. He’s got exploding pellets than can create a fog that paralyzes people. He’s got a “mind fogging” machine that can mess with people’s minds. Overall, he’s pretty on brand, it’s just not the brand that would get him points in a Beekeeper Review.

And, as Batman villains go, he’s got a sweet set-up. He’s not only got his own henchmen, but his sister and daughter are in on his crimes and use the girls at the “posh girls finishing school” they run as an additional set of henchmen. That’s two henchgroups in this one criminal setup. Pretty good deal.

But Ffogg is a beekeeper as well. Though it seems to be a mere hobby for him. He keeps only a single hive, though it is full of African Death Bees (“One sting and you’re finished”). That’s an impressively badass-sounding type of bee, but the closest he gets to using beekeeping as a part his life of crime is to have his hive set up is a trap for those who might be snooping around his estate. When he showed up in the comics based on the show his bees were not even mentioned (also, there he was called “Professor Ffogg”, so perhaps he lost his Lordship).

I have some theories about Ffogg. He’s from “one of the most aristocratic families in the land” and I feel that this was probably a family with some more respectable beekeepers before Marmaduke came along. Devices like the fog pellets and the fog pipe may have been adapted from technology they used for smoke. That theory will never likely be confirmed either way, but if it were true it means that Ffogg is even more disappointing. Sorry, Marmaduke, but you’re not what we’re looking for.

One Honeycomb out of Five.

Bees are disappearing and something needs to be done about that. “1313: Giant Killer Bees!” is a “movie” that uses that as the setup for its “plot”. In an attempt to give bees the boost they need to survive, some professor has shipped a bunch of handsome students to a tropical compound to try to fix bees with experiments. Paul is the only beekeeper in the project, everyone else being a mere scientist.

Well, the experiments result in giant bees that turn people into zombies and Paul dies almost immediately. They can’t all be winners. But hey, the movie says that he’s basically one of the only competent people involved in the project. He had nothing to do with the injections that caused the mutations. The fact that he removes his protective mask while running away from a giant bee could be a sign of stupidity, but maybe he can just gauge how useless it would be against a giant bee, right? Could be. Wants to free up his peripheral vision? Maybe?

Anyway… The giant bees cause the end of the world.

Two Honeycombs out of Five. He seemed to be a functional beekeeper, but in the face of the supernatural, he could not hold his own.

Charlotte “Chuck” Charles appeared in the show “Pushing Daisies”. Unfortunately, she was killed off in the very first episode. Fortunately, this was a show where that doesn’t stop her, for the protagonist, a piemaker named Ned, has the ability to raise the dead with his touch. There are rules about how this works, but those are his deal and this is about Chuck, so let’s focus on her.

The facts are these: When Chuck was young, her father died. Afterward, she was raised by her aunts, who introduced her to beekeeping. After growing up and being murdered, she was resurrected by Ned. Now ‘Alive-Again’ (a term she prefers over undead), Chuck resumes her beekeeping career on a roof in the city (“Operation: Urban Honey Pioneer”).

Does she have any powers? Well, she probably won’t age, that counts for something. If I really want to push it, I can say that she has used mood-enhancing drugs while baking pies, which is sort of like being knowledgeable with potions and stuff. She keeps her cool even when being swarmed by bees that aren’t her own, which is good and actually beekeeping-related. More significantly, when her bees are killed by “rogue pesticides” she has Ned reanimate them all, creating a hive full of ageless Alive-Again bees. That’s pretty neat. Finally, she has claimed that the honey that she and the bees make now is the best she’s had, though she admits that most things taste better since her death, so we can’t be too sure. There is no legacy of beekeeping in her family, though. It seems that her aunts simply found an ad for some bees in a magazine and thought it might cheer her up. The aunts seem to have helped out when she was a kid, but this is not one of those cases where a beekeeper comes from a lineage of those in the profession.

Well, what kind of person is she? It is implied that she has some sins in her past that she wants to make up for after her rebirth, but I don’t see the signs of Beekeeper Rage. In her post-death life, she joins Ned and his friends as they solve mysteries. I’ve not covered this before, but I definitely put solving mysteries in the same category as being a badass fighter. Solving mysteries is just fighting crime with your brain’s fists, after all. By the end of the series, she is even adopting a “superhero”-style nickname for herself: “The Alive-Again Avenger”. Sounds like she’s in this for keeps. Alright, so how does she stack up?

Three Honeycombs out of Five. She’s an impressive beekeeper with some supernatural elements, I’ll give her that. But, apart from one episode that made mention of the fact that Egyptians connected bees with death, the supernatural elements have little to do with her being a beekeeper. She’s a reanimated crimefighter who happens to keep bees.