Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 1
My Life as a Worker Bee
The Monday after my first visit with the honeybees, I was back commuting from my
home in Connecticut to my office in New York City. I was creative director for a small
giftware company, developing gifts and home-accessory products to be manufactured
overseas, then brought back to the United States to be sold at trade shows and at our re-
tailshopinGreenwichVillage.Thebestpartofmyjobwasresearchingandshoppingfor
new ideas. I was given considerable creative freedom and the luxury to travel to China,
which is how I survived the more mundane aspects of my day-to-day work. Still, many
times the owners of the company shot down my best concepts because they thought the
ideas were too outlandish or would not lead to enough sales to make it worth the manu-
facturing efforts. Products always followed trends and it was my job to adhere to them,
but not too closely. Frequently my designs needed to be watered down and made pal-
atable for the general public. Our biggest challenge as a small company was competing
with the larger stores that could make more products faster and cheaper. It could be an
exhausting process—one that could quickly and easily dull the creative spirit. And I'd
been feeling very weary of it.
As I stood on the platform in the early morning sunshine, waiting for my train, I real-
ized that where I really wanted to be was back in the bee-yard. The exhilarating exper-
ience of communing with those bees was still fresh in my mind. Suddenly, I craved the
country life, to be in the garden, toiling under the sun, caring for my very own Italian
honeybees. “What was really standing in my way?” I wondered. Of course, the obliga-
tion of my work often took me away from home for several weeks at a time. Who would
careformybeeswhileIwasgone?Wouldtheystarve,ormissme?Didtheyneedspecial
attention? Clearly, I needed to learn more.
That morning, the train was late, so I wandered inside the station house. This particu-
larstationhousehadnoseats,butdidhaveafree,communal topic rack wherecommuters
couldtakeandleave topics as they passedthroughthestation.The topics gavethestation
a cozy feeling. I perused the rack as I waited, and a red book with the word “beekeep-
er” on the cover caught my eye. To my utter delight, I saw it was titled
The Beekeeper's
Apprentice
. I plucked the old, tattered paperback off the shelf to examine it. It turned out
to be a mystery about Sherlock Holmes, who, I was elated to find, kept honeybees. The
topic was just the remedy I needed, a small distraction from the workday that lay ahead.
Once I got onto the train, I dove right into that topic. A huge Sherlock Holmes fan,
I was fascinated and charmed by the story, in which Holmes meets a young intellectu-
