A Very Short Story.
Some years ago, I worked for a creative director who regularly organized activities meant to inspire her copywriters and designers and reset our creative brains. One day, she took us to a local farmers market and asked us to write stories based on our trip when we returned. “The Beekeeper’s Secret” was mine.
I’m no Stephen King (hell, these days, Stephen King isn’t even Stephen King), but this is a devilish little number that I think you might enjoy.
The Beekeeper’s Secret
Bob had raised bees and sold honey at the area’s farmers markets for as long as he could remember. Nineteen years and three months, to be precise, and if that wasn’t long enough to win him some standing in the market community, then what on God’s green Earth was?
But Bob had a problem, and his problem’s name was Hal.
Hal was a beekeeper too, and he’d buzzed onto the scene at the start of the season, all bumbling grace and folksy charm and “aw-shucks” friendly facade. Since then, Bob’s honey business just hadn’t been the same.
Everything had started out amicably enough. Bob first spotted Hal one sullen, gray Saturday morning on the square as the gangly new vendor struggled to set up his table. Bob had offered to lend a hand, and he’d barely even blinked when he learned that the new fellow’s business was the same as his own. After all, he was the veteran around these parts. He’d been the area’s honey-man for nearly two decades. Surely, this well-meaning but awkward amateur would not pose a threat, and most likely wouldn’t last the summer.
Oh, how wrong Bob had been. As it turned out, the newcomer meant business.
He may not have made much of an impression that first weekend. But by week two, Bob’s new rival had printed up sharp-looking, high-gloss fliers emblazoned with a new logo and tagline (“Hal’s Honey: As Sweet as Can Bee,” complete with a cute little smiling cartoon honeybee)—that contained fascinating facts about bees and the art of beekeeping.
That got Bob to thinking, and soon enough, he’d printed up his own fliers. “Bob’s Busy Bees,” proclaimed the header next to a photo of a buzzing beehive. “For a Honey of a Treat!”
But the competition was only just heating up.
The following week, Hal raised the stakes by offering free samples at his booth. Two weeks later, he raised them again by handing out tickets for free tours of his bee farm.
Over the course of two months, Bob watched in horror as his honey sales dived 60 percent. And it wasn’t just his honey business at the farmers markets that was suffering. It was his business overall. Hal and his dopey smiling honeybees were killing him, and there was nothing he could do.
All of this was before his rival even broke out the heavy artillery: the goddamn bee costume.
Bob simply stood agog in his booth the first time he saw it: a giant black-and-yellow striped polystyrene monstrosity, anatomically correct with two pairs of bee wings, six legs and two fuzzy black balls that bounced and bobbed comically at the ends of wire antennae as Hal floated busily about his booth.
That’s it, bee boy, Bob seethed as soon as his smoldering brain regained some of its ability to think. You’re going down . . . Just you wait.
But that’s not what happened.
Three weeks later, Bob unceremoniously pulled the plug on his farmers market operations. It stung him to do it. It was painfully embarrassing. But what was the point of gathering up his booth, his signs, and his supplies each weekend, of driving to town and sitting outside for long hours in the sun and the heat and the wind and the rain, if he wasn’t going to sell anything?
It made no sense, he knew. No sense at all.
Then one evening, he saw the article in Popular Science, the one about the curious experiments with European honeybees.
Apparently, researchers had trained common honeybees to recognize the faces of individual people—using the exact same series of black-and-white pictures that are used to test human memory. Despite having brains 20,000 times smaller than humans, the researchers said, the bees showed a remarkable ability to spot the same human face, even days after training.
You know, Bob thought, I bet Africanized honey bees are at least that smart.
All at once, he knew what he needed to do.
Back to blog home page.
Nice!
Thanks, Craig! Glad you liked it.