Brother Ellis Kane is formerly Sgt. Ellis Kane, part of a unit of American Marines. When his former Captain was killed, Kane became a suspect in an episode of NCIS: Hawaii. He served multiple tours with the Marines, but it didn’t end well. He got caught up in a whole thing with a corrupt superior and helping protect a friend who was testifying against that superior and all that stuff. The exact details aren’t important, but Kane was drummed out, seemingly haunted by things he’d done and witnessed, and turned to religion. He joined a monastery at which he… you may have guessed it, became a beekeeper. And I’ll cut to the chase, he didn’t do the murder.

Kane is a highly-trained ex-military type, and was depicted as a man who had a lot of anger, though that could very well be understandable anger given he was caught up in wars and corruption. Unlike sufferers of Beekeeper Rage, this guy found peace when he kept his bees. He’s also very willing to put himself in harms way to protect an innocent friend. And I don’t know if this is typical of this kind of show, but he wound up in the climactic showdown alongside the protagonists, which shows he can still be involved in the action if needed. He’s pretty good for a Beekeeper with no supernatural abilities depicted.

Three Honeycomb out of Five. For the record, there are other monks around the monastery too. They never get any lines or are shown doing anything, though. Probably they also help keep the bees, but for all I know the whole thing is Kane’s idea.

“But I had never met Sir John, had never visited Tremoth Hall, till the time of those happenings which formed the final tragedy. My father had taken me from England to Canada when I was a small infant; he had prospered in Manitoba as an apiarist; and after his death the bee ranch had kept me too busy for years to execute a long-cherished dream of visiting my natal land and exploring its rural by-ways.”

Today’s Beekeepers are from a short story from 1933 called “The Unnamed Offspring” by Clark Ashton Smith and it is part of the “Cthulhu Mythos” of stories, which means it shares a lineage with the unnamed Greek Beekeeper I have reviewed before. In that story the Beekeeper was offhandedly mentioned and never showed up. In this one of the Beekeepers is the protagonist, though his beekeeping is only offhandedly mentioned. Well, still better than nothing.

Henry Chaldane is our protagonist. His father, Arthur Chaldane, was the one who originally “prospered in Manitoba as an apiarist” but his father is dead by the time our story begins. Henry took over the “bee ranch” after that and, while it kept him busy for years, he eventually got to a point where either he had enough help running the place he could take some time off, or he just sold it. In either case, Henry is not actively keeping bees at this time, but it is theoretically possible that he has people doing it for him back in Canada while he travels. We know that Arthur was good at beekeeping and Henry seems to have followed in his footsteps, so that’s all good.

But what of the extras of being a Beekeeper? The Chaldanes have no supernatural abilities. We only spend time with Henry and he seems nice enough. He rides a motorcycle, which is unsafe but undeniably cool. When thrust into a horror story scenario, he understands what is going on around him almost immediately. And he’s not necessarily combat-focused by nature, but when given a gun and asked to help fight off a monstrous Ghoul, he does his best. His best fails, but it’s a brave kind of failure.

Two Honeycombs out of Five. I’d love to be able to give him more, but we’re just not given enough information to work with.

Hey you know how neither Spider-Man nor Goofy are known for beekeeping? Well, imagine they were the same guy. Now he’s a Beekeeper! I don’t know why!

This one caught me by surprise. For some reason when the companies who own Spider-Man and Goofy decided to make a comic about Goofy going through Spider-Man’s origin, they added an apiarist angle that neither of the source characters have. The whole story reads to me (and probably could actually be) like one of those Disney comics from Europe that I read and maybe everything hasn’t been translated just perfectly, so maybe I’m missing something. Maybe this makes sense over there. But I don’t have that information, so I can only go on what I see here.

What I see here is a version of Goofy called Goofy Parker who is a student who lives with his Aunt Tessie. Even before he has a superhero origin, he is a prodigy when it comes to entymology and nothing else. He barely notices that other subjects exist. He loves all insects, but the bees that he and Tessie care for are his favourites to the extent that he has named them all individually and will stop and say hi or bye to each of them on his way to school. They provide wax that he and Tessie use to keep their motorcycle nice and shiny.

Unlike Peter Parker, Goofy Parker actually seems to be liked by his fellow students. They ask him to hang out, but he’s always more interested in his insect studies and whatnot. But his origin does soon come to mirror Peter’s very quickly. Goofy discovers an unknown species of spider, it gets radioactive and bites him, he gets powers and he creates the Spider-Goofy identity to try to solve his family’s financial problems. A point of divergence here is that, where Peter ignores a criminal he could stop because he doesn’t think it matters to him, Spider-Goofy ignores the Beagle Boys as they do some crimes because he doesn’t seem to know what’s going on. While Peter loses an uncle because of his choice, Goofy loses his motorcycle, but then makes money from the whole event. Doesn’t really have the same resonance as Peter’s version of the origin doesn’t it? But anyway, after he solves the family’s money problems he also buys nice new hives for his bees.

So we have a Beekeeper who is an expert at insects (and nothing else), who also has Spider-Man powers. That is a powerful combination, to be sure. The only thing I can dock him for is that the Beekeeping is pretty incidental to the Spider-Manning half of his life. If he’d been a Bee-themed hero or something, he’d rate a five, but as it is…

Four Honeycomb out of Five. I don’t know why he’s a Beekeeper!

This one is from Futurama. Petunia is a minor recurring character who has, as of this writing, been seen only once as a Beekeeper, in a non-canon story in which she runs Petunia’s Self-Serve Bee Farm. Does she also run this place in canonical Futurama stories? Well, we don’t know. We simply can’t know that. It means that I don’t have to dock her any points for things she does in canonical appearances, since that is essentially a different character, but also it means I can’t award her any points for skills she displays or things she does in those canonical appearances. I can only infer things from this story alone.

Well, canonical stories or not, one of Petunia’s defining characteristics is that she’s an inveterate smoker (should I award a point because Beekeepers use smoke as a tool?). Also, while she wears a beekeeping mask, she doesn’t need the full suit so she’s either comfortable around the bees or just too numb to care if she’s stung. I do admit that she’s got an attitude problem. The very fact the place is “self-serve” is indicative of how little effort she wants to put into the project. But to counter that point, I’ve also got to talk about the bee farm itself. It seems to be going well enough. There’s plenty of hives, look at all the honey and combs and stuff. It’s even open late on Kwanzaa! The place is named after Petunia herself, so one assumes she gets the credit for the fact it seems to be running at least at a stable level. And there’s the big hive design on the roof and all the little hexagon combs on the signage. It’s good branding.

We’re told in this story that “there ain’t no beeswax in the whole world” and Petunia is able to recognize that the bees (apparently not just hers, but all of the bees on Earth, I guess) are “acting crazy” though she doesn’t seem to realize it is because of parasites. Also, she seems to have a fatalistic acceptance of this coming doom to the insects. But even while the bees are apparently so sick that they won’t make wax, we do see honey and combs for sale there. Somehow, in spite of her utter indifference, Petunia has kept the place running as the world’s bees (again, not just hers) are dying. I’d definitely give a better score if she actually bothered to do any one thing to help the bees, but alas, I can not.

Two Honeycomb out of Five. There are downsides (doesn’t seem to care), but there are upsides (good branding and apparent persistence) and they cancel each other out to reach the average beekeeper score.

The Bee-Man of Orn is a story written by Frank R. Stockton. It’s set in an ancient fantasy land called Orn and stars a Bee-Man. That all checks out so far, I suppose. Let’s look a little closer…

I’m going to start with a standard Beekeeper Review check on supernatural abilities: he’s got those. It is noted that even if the bees he lived with weren’t accustomed to him (though they are) it would be pointless for them to sting him because it would be like stinging a rock, since he’s so tough. It’s noted that he is able to locate wild bee hives with some instinctive knowledge that even he doesn’t understand. His bees are noted as being especially industrious and friendly. He’s shown to be able to undergo on a long and arduous journey while carrying a hive on his back, which provides honey for him to live off of (on smaller journeys he just lets the bees in his pocket produce the honey for him). And he’s brave enough that when he sees a baby in peril at the hands of a dragon, he will act to save that baby (using a hive as a projectile no less). It’s all very impressive stuff for a beekeeper, I’d say. But…

But does he actually KEEP the bees, or just hang around them?

The guy definitely lives with bees. That’s for certain. In fact, he lives in a hut the narration says is basically a hive, since every potential space for honeycombs is indeed taken up by honeycombs. He doesn’t need room for anything else, because he do anything else with it. He doesn’t seem to do much of anything. We never even see him caring for the bees or helping them in any way. He lives off their honey and uses their honeycombs when bartering for goods, but is he doing anything for them?

And when I say he doesn’t do much, I mean that he doesn’t seem to do ANYTHING else. One of the benefits of Beekeeping that I often extol is that it allows one time to do other things, like learning science or whatever. The Bee-Man doesn’t even seem to have any hobbies beyond wandering away from his own hives to find wild hives, ostensibly for fun.

But here’s the thing, his bees ARE thriving. And when, in the course of the story, the Bee-Man is de-aged back to infancy and given the chance to do his life over and maybe become something “better” he doesn’t become something else, he grows up to be the Bee-Man again. It’s like he “just knows” that this is what he’s supposed to be. As I mentioned, he’s able to find wild hives with supernatural ability that “just knows” where to go. I posit that he’s also unaware of the beneficial effect he has on the bees around him, even with minimal actual work. They get something from his very presence, something about his aura benefits the bees so that they are happy and healthy, and he “just knows” this is what he’s meant to be doing with his life.

Five Honeycomb out of Five. Even if it could be argued he’s closer to being a Four, he did it twice!