The Simpsons was a pretty great show. Season Six of the Simpsons was smack in the middle of its best years. Lisa’s Rival was a good episode. Homer getting a pile of sugar was an excellent subplot. That’s when the Simpsons got Beekeepers.

Homer gives a rousing speech about why it his right and his duty to protect and sell his pile of sugar when suddenly a swarm of bees descends upon it. He tries to fight them, but can’t win (“Ow! They’re defending themselves somehow!”). Soon the local beekeepers notice that their apiary is oddly quiet (“No noise… suggests no bees”). Seeing one lone bee, so they follow it in their “beemobile”, which is actually a Chevy, and track the bee to Homer and his pile. They assume that Homer has taken their bees on purpose and are prepared to pay him to get back their swarm, but then it starts to rain, the pile melts, and the bees head home. Homer gets nothing for all his hard work.

These two are pretty great. The taller one (voiced by Hank Azaria) is very much based on Adam West’s Batman. The shorter one (Harry Shearer) is the perfect compliment to the other. It astounds me that, on a show like the Simpsons, these guys never came back. I admit, there’s a decade and a half of Simpsons that I haven’t seen, but from what I can tell from the Internet these guys have never so much as appeared in a crowd scene or anything. They don’t even have a page on the Simpsons Wikia site. What the chunks?

I can only assume the beekeepers themselves didn’t want to be seen. They don’t really display any special powers, except perhaps being able to follow a single bee while they’re in a car, so maybe the power they did have was keeping hidden. They have no preternatural control over their bees at all. Still, being given a Batman-reference for a voice is an indication of badassness if nothing else is. They do seem fairly safe from Beekeeper Rage, though. Even as think Homer is a criminal genius they don’t get very angry at him. They almost seem to respect his cunning.

Incidentally, the name of their company, Goldsboro Honey, is a reference to a song called “Honey” by a guy called Bobby Goldsboro that there is, apparently. I learned that thanks to the Internet.

Two Honeycombs out of Five.

While writing this I learned that there’s an episode in the twentieth season that deals with beekeeping, but these guys aren’t even in there. I’ll have to deal with that one someday way, way down the line.

Dial H was an iteration of DC Comics’ Dial H for Hero franchise. The basic concept is that the protagonist(s) have a dial that, when activated, turns them into a superhero. This Beekeeper was one such transformation, so the panel above is actually someone else using the identity of this hero. But Dial H, at least, used the notion that the heroic identities made by the dial were actually the heroes of other universes, so somewhere out there this Beekeeper is probably fighting all types of crime.

That single panel is, as far as I know, the only appearance of this Beekeeper (I’m assuming they’re named “the Beekeeper” because of the B and K on the costume). Still, that single panel tells us an awful lot. This Beekeeper can sic bees on their enemies, which is a great, if standard, beekeeper ability. This Beekeeper also make good use of their smoker, also fairly standard, but depicted less frequently. But then: This Beekeeper Rides A Flying Hive! That’s new. It appears that the hive is actually carried by the swarm, and it must be assumed that the Beekeeper uses this hive as their primary mode of transportation, like the Green Goblin’s glider. It’s a pretty great visual. And on top of it all, sweet cape.

We don’t, sadly, know anything of this Beekeeper’s personality. The Dial would not have summoned this identity if they weren’t a good guy, but beyond that we know nothing. Did they swear revenge on crime after their Beekeeper parents were killed by mobsters? Was this Beekeeper chosen by bees to do good in the world because they were such a noble soul? Was radioactive bee-stinging involved? We don’t know. As such, it’s really hard to rate this Beekeeper with any real authority. But if anyone can do it, I can:

Three Honeycombs out of Five. Cool powers, cool visual. We don’t know enough to go higher, but also we don’t know enough to go lower.

Beekeepers aren’t always on the side of good. During the Golden Age of Comics there were plenty of superheroes, which, of course, means there were even more super villains. Captain Freedom may never have made it to the big leagues of superheroes, but he had a run in Speed Comics that lasted for a few years. Probably fought a lot of supervillains in that time. In one issue, issue #35, the villain was a beekeeper.

So it seems that Captain Freedom’s deal is that he is your standard low-powered patriotic hero who hangs out with a tough kid gang (Those were popular in those days. The Newsboy Legion and the Young Allies are some of the more prominent examples.) Captain Freedom’s friends, the Young Defenders, stumble upon an argument between beekeeper Jabez Mather and his neighbor Hiram Bymore. It seems that these two have been at odds for years, and their families have been feuding for generations. This isn’t gonna end well for Hiram, because Jabez is a particularly science-minded beekeeper.

Indeed, in spite of his apparently country bumpkin nature, Jabez has successfully invented an “insect growin’ process” that makes his bees gigantic. Like the size of flying dogs or something. Also, Jabez is apparently able to control his bees by ordering them around by humming. But the first of the big bees refuses to listen to Jabez and goes out and stings Hiram’s bull to death. Hiram responds by shooting up Jabez’s hives and the beekeeper responds by sending all his huge bees out to feast on human blood! Hiram is killed pretty quickly. Pears are stolen.

The Young Defenders are the first to investigate, but Jabez incapacitates the whole lot of them by throwing “a smoking smudge pot” at them, which renders them unconscious so that Jabez can tie them up and coat them with nectar so they’ll be eaten alive by bees. As is tradition for superheroes, Captain Freedom shows up to solve the problem with punches. The hero takes out one of the big bees, but all but declares that he’s doomed. He is surrounded by angry giant bees when Jabez foolishly decides to help the bees out by throwing a jar of nitric acid he had lying around.

Jabez manages to kill all of his own bees in that one acid toss. That would be an incredibly badass move if he’d done it to almost anyone except his already-winning bees. Jabez doesn’t even think to pass it off as a change of heart, instead he just makes a break for it. It doesn’t take long for Captain Freedom to catch up to him and punch him in the face. Jabez falls into one of his own hives and is fatally stung. As he lay in Captain Freedom’s arms, he laments his folly, then dies.

This is, I assume, Jabez’s only appearance. With so little to go on, I just decided to give you a full description of his story. Now we all know the tragic tale of Jabez Mather. It’s worth noting that Captain Freedom is apparently one of those golden age comic characters that have fallen into the public domain. So if any enterprising genius out there wanted to give us a sequel where he meet the rest of Jabez’s beekeeping family, it would be totally legal.

As far as supernatural beekeeping powers, Jabez provides a good showing: Giant bee creation and supernatural bee control humming are both impressive Beekeeping powers, and his use of smoke to take out the kids is pretty good too (I assume the Young Defenders are probably captured a lot, but still he got them pretty easily). It’s important to note that Jabez does not create his bees with evil intent, he just figures big bees will make a lot of honey. There is a possibility that the bee that killed Hiram’s bull was acting on Jabez’s hatred of Hiram, but that’s never said. As he said in his dying words, Jabez didn’t want to be a killer. It’s just that when Hiram shot up his hive, Jabez gave in to Beekeeper Rage. That was his downfall. So how does he rate?

Two Honeycombs out of Five. Beekeeper Rage squanders the potential of another promising apiarist.

Look, I have made no secret of the fact that I think Beekeepers are underrated. There is really no good reason why the apiarist should not be venerated among the paragons of badassness such as ninjas and pirates and such. To prove that this obsession is not wholly based on my own whims, over the next year or so, I’m going to take you all on a tour of the Beekeepers of fiction and at the end, you’ll all agree with me.

Fist Puncher. I mentioned Fist Puncher way back when I first heard about it. It is the tale of a group of vigilantes who fight their way across the city of San Cruces to rescue some kidnapped beauty queens. One of those vigilantes is a beekeeper, known only as the Beekeeper.

Like all of the Fist Puncher vigilantes, the Beekeeper is a stone-cold badass. In addition to all the standard punching and and jumping and kicking (and a special whirlwind kick thing) of a typical brawler hero, the Beekeeper’s got a swarm of bees to help. With her “Bee.S.P.” (like ESP, but bee-related) she can summon her bees to fly around the level just stinging any enemies that are around. She can also just throw a ball of bees right in an enemy’s face. I played through the game on a Beekeeper-only run and she was able to surmount every obstacle she came across. She rode motorcycles (and ostriches), she fought criminals and robots and Nazis and everything else, she even gained the ability to come back from the dead Twice Per Level. That’s a tough beekeeper.

But here’s the thing, I’m about to give away the end of the game: it turns out that the vigilantes might be acting a little bit rashly. Without going into specifics, it turns out that this cross-town rampage gives the real enemies exactly what they want. This highlights something we’re going to see a lot as I do these reviews: Beekeeper Rage. Beekeepers have anger issues. This is a consistent fact. This particular Beekeeper at least has the excuse that she is going along with her friends in her rampage, but peer-pressure doesn’t make it right. There’s apparently another mode that continues the story, but even if she and her friends get their act together there, the damage has been done.

So, altogether, what do we have? We’ve got a Beekeeper with bees willing to fight and die for her, apparent supernatural powers, and genuine fighting skills. If she could reign in her anger, she’d score higher. As it is, this mysterious Beekeeper’s rating is:

Four Honeycombs out of Five. We’ll soon see that that’s a pretty high score.