Beekeeper Review: Ellen (Beavis and Butthead)

Ellen is a Beekeeper who appeared in an episode of Beavis and Butthead. We don’t know a lot about her. but she seems to be doing alright for herself. She’s got at least three hives, a regular table at a local farmer’s market complete with a sign saying “Ellen’s Honey”, and she sells jars of honey for fifty dollars. So there’s clearly some combination of the honey being really good and her customers being stupid. Either way, she’s found a reasonable amount of success at the job.

Obviously things go poorly from there. I can absolutely not penalize Ellen for saying something that steers Beavis and Butthead into doing incredibly stupid things. Every single person ever encountered by Beavis and Butthead has done the same. She takes no blame for what those idiots do. And when, as a result of their actions, Ellen’s home is filled with a nest’s worth of some of the most pissed-off wasps in history, I can’t really penalize her for being caught off guard and being unable to defend herself. She does, somewhat impressively, manage to jump through a kitchen window in her attempt to escape the wasps, though she unintentionally smashes through her own hives as a result. It’s not a great showing, but it isn’t her fault.

Two Honeycomb out of Five. Normal but successful Beekeeper, mild setback caused by idiots.

Beekeeper Review: Scott

Gonna do one of those obscure easy ones today. Scott (no last name provided) is the narrator of a horror story called “The Queen of the Zombie Bees” by someone going by the handle Reene Writes. It’s a very short piece in the Creepypasta style, so we don’t get a lot of depth, but that will never stop me.

Scott is a Beekeeper and genuinely seems to love bees. It doesn’t seem like he is an apiarist professionally, he’s only got one hive I guess, but he enjoys it and respects them as animals. This causes problems between Scott and his neighbour, Miss Simpson, who hates bees and wants him to get rid of the hive. That status quo is broken when Simpson tries to get rid of Scott’s bees herself and she winds up possessed by the queen, who puppets Simpson’s corpse around and uses it as a hive for a colony of big fat bees making a strange blood honey. In spite of being described as nearly lifeless, these bees seem to be having success, they even manage to create another hive (presumably also “ruled” by the queen in Simpson’s body, I guess?) outside of Simpson’s house.

Scott sees that second hive and that’s what gets his attention. In spite of the animosity between him and Simpson, he suits up and goes over to investigate and try to help, though it is too late. He discovers the weird “zombie bees” and that the queen is puppeting Simpson around, the understandably flees and calls the cops. The zombie bees and their corpse-riding queen are suddenly nowhere to be found.

It’s like this, though: how did the bees do this? Is this level of supernatural talent in the bees a result of Scott being very good at beekeeping? It could be. In any case, the bees never did this to Scott. Maybe they respected him too much, but saw Simpson as a threat? It could very well be that if they had not been met with the hatred of Miss Simpson, their powers would have manifested in some less-icky way. Whatever the case, if they did care for Scott, it seems to have ended with this strange transformation, given that when he discovers what happened to Simpson, they attack him with pretty vicious intent.

Two Honeycomb out of Five. Any potential supernatural bonus points he gets are lost because, you know, he didn’t keep his bees. That’s a big part of it. But one thing I can’t take from him: the events of the story are said to happen the same day he narrates it, but that doesn’t stop him from opening with bad bee jokes.

Beekeeper Review: Woody Boyd

Woody Boyd from Cheers is a bartender, but also a Beekeeper! It’s always a good sign when a Beekeeper is famous enough that he has his own Wikipedia page, so let’s see how Woody does.

Woody’s shtick on the show is that he is the good-natured farmboy from Hanover, Indiana who comes to the big city (in this case Boston) and works at the bar. His most common joke is that he’s slow or naive. The keeping of bees only came up in one episode (Season Seven, Episode Three, “Executive Sweet”, an episode that does not merit its own Wikipedia page). Surely, if it only came up once, it can’t be that big a facet of the character can it? Well, let’s see. In that episode Woody inherits 4000 Buckfast bees from his uncle, saying “When I was a kid, you couldn’t keep me away from my uncle Fergie’s hives.” That resulted in the people around town giving young Woody the nickname “Woody the Beekeeper” which certainly seems like enough to get him on the board for my purposes.

With uncle Fergie retired, Woody eagerly takes these bees and keeps them in the bar’s office until he finishes his shift. This is a sitcom, so of course the bees manage to get loose, but using the proper gear and equipment and only getting stung a couple times, Woody gathers them up and takes them home. That’s the last thing we know for sure.

Does Woody keep up his apiarist ways? Well, there’s no canonical proof, but I think so. Bartending is Woody’s preferred occupation. It’s where he’s meant to be. He was never going to leave the bar. The show ends with Woody elected as a city councilman, but we know from his appearance on Frasier that he went back to Cheers when that was over (which is not a surprise given that once, when talking about reincarnation, he said he’d like to come back in his next life as the President of France, because he thought that would be good for the bar). But one of my oft-cited benefits of keeping bees is that it can be done while still pursuing other occupations. We know that Woody did other kinds of farming while he lived in the city, he’s shown successfully growing a large pumpkin, so given the lack of evidence otherwise and how excited he was to receive them, I think I can rule that Woody probably continued to be a Beekeeper.

With that settled, how does Woody rate for the things that PDR uses to rate a Beekeeper? Well, he has positives and negatives. The guy is so sweet it seems like he might be immune to Beekeeper Rage. He does talk once about the need to bottle up feelings, but given how often he actually does let those feelings out I don’t think he really lives by it. That’s just one of several wrong-headed old-fashioned ideas that were instilled in him back in Hanover. Perhaps that upbringing is also the root of one of his biggest character flaws: when things are going very well for Woody (such as when he was first acclimating to his wife’s wealthy lifestyle, or even just when winning a lot of money via gambling) he can be rude. When it comes down to it though, Woody is too nice for the anger or the rudeness to stick. If he realizes that he is lashing out or mistreating anyone he will generally back down and try to fix things because he feels bad about it. He just likes people too much.

Some might think he should be docked for being dumb, but not me. And anyway, Woody’s intellect comes out in other ways. In fact, back in Hanover he was occasionally teased for being a “brainiac” in spite of being held back in school more than once. He’s able to do things like memorize the serial numbers on his money in case he needs to prove that it is his and he’s proven more than once to be good at gambling on sports and playing poker, though it seems more instinct than anything. Also, he can sleep standing up.

Still, Woody doesn’t have any paranormal abilities (though Hanover is once cited as UFO capital of the world) and he’s no good in a fight and seems to be more susceptible than the average person to hypnosis. I can’t rate him any higher than:

Three Honeycomb out of Five.

I admit that I’d love to be able to give him a point for being an ubiquitous part of popular culture, similar to how Friar Tuck got a bonus for being legendary, but Woody doesn’t quite clear that bar. Cheers is still remembered as a classic sitcom, sure, but I can’t deny that its not the zeitgeist-dominating juggernaut it once was. Maybe someday the kids will learn about Cheers and it will be popular again. Then Woody can show up on the Frasier reboot and it will focus intently on his beekeeping. Until then, this is it.

Beekeeper Review: Kaydee Festermeyer

Kaydee Festermeyer appeared on a cartoon called Dicktown, a comedy about the “boy detective” genre. Kaydee’s story is one of the show’s mysteries, and I’m about to reveal a bunch of spoilers, if you care about any of that.

Kaydee is definitely a person who found herself early, and so, even when she was a high school student she was essentially who she would be for life. That includes keeping bees. We don’t actually know the extent or details of her beekeeping, but she had what one character described as “a super dangerous beehive” in school. And as an adult, she still has bees, which she uses as a weapon. I am left assuming that she is a pretty successful beekeeper.

Also, she just has a general air of “badassery” that works for what I am seeking in a Beekeeper. She cures her own tobacco that she uses to make her own cigars, in school she had a pet raccoon named Ripper that she used to guard her locker because it didn’t lock, and as an adult she has an outfit/helmet that makes her look like some kind of motorcycle ninja while she drives a Polaris Slingshot, which is some manner of outlandish vehicle that really serves only to signify “cool” status. Oh, and she can set traps too. In general, she’s just tough.

In school, Kaydee was wrongfully blamed for a crime by the show’s protagonist John Hunchman. The school took the boy detective at his word and Kaydee wound up being expelled. As adults, she enacted a plan to get revenge on Hunchman, and it really seems like she’s got a bad case of the Beekeeper Rage. But actually, Kaydee is not as terminally rage-filled as it might first appear. She makes it clear that after being expelled, she went on with her life and put it all behind her until she moved back to town as an adult and found Hunchman still doing the detective thing. That brought up the bad memories and Hunchman didn’t even remember who she was. Her name aside, her anger is not something that had been festering, but was fresh and impulsive. Ultimately, after Hunchman realized he’d been wrong, Kaydee accepted his apology and ceased hostilities. She wanted justice to be done and once it was, she was able to back down. Good for her.

Four Honeycomb out of Five.

Beekeeper Review: Violet Thomas

Today’s review is of a Beekeeper who appeared in the Eisner-nominated comic strip The Beekeeper’s Due. It’s only four pages, so you should check it out. It’s not bad. But… how does the Beekeeper rate?

I hope you read it, because I’m about to spoil every aspect without providing the actual experience of reading the thing. Violet is a single mother who had a beekeeping operation with her daughter, Amelia (the setup reminds me of the Williams family from Umma). All indications are that they were relatively successful and certainly happy until Amelia fell sick. The young girl died due to complications from a surgery to remove her appendix.

Understandably, Violet was upset. The story never gives us the certainty to prove it, but taking Violet’s word for it, there is a high likelihood that the doctor performing the surgery was in an unfit state. Violet tried to deal with this through the courts, but the doctor was acquitted. That’s when Beekeeper Rage really took Violet. She poisoned some honey and got it to the doctor. He ate it and died.

Now, let’s see. I give Violet credit for trying to deal with things through the legal system first. That would help me to give her the benefit of the doubt against her first big mistake: she gave the poisoned honey to the doctor via a gift basket delivery. We don’t know if the doctor has children, but he does have at least one person (probably a wife) who lives with him, and leaving poisoned honey is not a precision strike. Innocents could have eaten that.

Probably that would have left me with a 2/5 Beekeeper rating, but there’s one other thing: after her successful assassination, Violet returned home and burned down her whole operation, the greenhouse and the hives. It’s symbolic, I suppose, of the way her life was ruined by the whole situation. She thanks the bees and apologizes as she does it, but still: once you burn down your hives, you’re not really a Beekeeper anymore.

One Honeycomb out of Five.