“They only live for about a month in the summer.” says the beekeeper. “They live longer in the winter, but in the summer the poor girls literally work themselves to death.”
“The girls?” I ask.
“Yeah, worker bees are always female. They have different jobs depending on how old they are, but all the workers are girls.”
“What about the boy bees?”
“Humph” sniffs the beekeeper. “They don’t do anything except wait to have sex with the queen.”

The beekeeper moves around the boxes that make up each hive, checking for honey and brood (baby bees). My job is to work the smoker and make sure to keep the bees calm and mellow while she works.

I get distracted taking pictures and let the smoker die three times before the beekeeper tells me to just forget it.

I am not a good worker bee.

Fortunately, the beekeeper is patient, and comes up with a new job for me. “Here, lift up these two frame boxes so I can check to see if we have a new queen in this hive yet.” I life the heavy boxes and c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y move them to the table. It’s easy to be focused when you are holding a big wooden crate with 60,000 buzzing bees in it.

The beekeeper has not always been a beekeeper. She went to photography school and got an internship retouching photos at a magazine that specializes in the “west coast lifestyle” – gardening, outdoor living, and the like, and when the internship was over she turned it into a full time job.

The magazines headquarters is a beautiful sprawling complex of flower beds, gardens, test kitchens and indoor and outdoor living areas. Everyone who works for the magazine also has the opportunity to help out in one of the garden areas, and when they decided to add beehives she volunteered to work with them and became the beekeeper.

She still has her ‘real’ job – retouching images and prepping them for the print version of the magazine. She has a nice cubicle, great co-workers and an empowering boss. It’s a good gig, but she really comes alive when she is working with ‘her girls’. Working with multiple hives over the past three years, she has gone from complete novice to professional beekeeper.

Standing by the hives she takes off one of her heavy work gloves and sticks a finger into a frame crawling with buzzing bees. She pulls her hand back and a bee immediately lands on her outstretched finger and starts to eat the honey. The Beekeeper laughs. “See, they won’t sting you unless they feel threatened, they just want to eat.”

The beekeeper like both of her jobs for their unique challenges and rewards and she hope that she can keep both of them for a while despite the obstacles presented by things like ‘new media’ and ‘colony collapse disorder’. “Being a beekeeper isn’t a good full time career” she explains, “unless you want to make a career out of being poor. But she doesn’t sound entirely convinced that poverty and bees have to travel hand in hand, and her eyes light up when she talks about doing more bee work.

After lunch, I ride Big Jim north towards Oakland, and I think about my friend the beekeeper and how happy she seems with her life and her jobs and her bees. I remember how excited she was when she first got her internship, and how hard she worked to turn it into a job. I remember her plans and how she thought her career would go, and how the bees seem to have thrown a happily unexpected twist into her plan. I think about how roads don’t always lead where we think they will even when we think we have thought of everything and that sometimes even when you aren’t looking for the perfect thing, the perfect thing comes along and find you anyway.

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