Today I have to grapple with something I should have done before now: the line between entomologist and beekeeper. I might as well do it in the form of a review of Professor Benedict O. Fields, who appeared in the Outer Limits episode called “ZZZZZ“.

Fields has bees that he keeps. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of time and they don’t have a traditional hive that we get to see, but they’re in his lab. And he isn’t harvesting their honey or anything, what Fields takes gathers is information. I’ve said before that science and beekeeping go together well, so keeping the bees to study them works fine for my purposes. Fields is an award-winning scientist with a reputation for perfectionism who has written books about medieval stories of bees and developed a machine that allows translation of bee language into English and vice versa. The man is devoted to bees. He doesn’t seem especially warm to them, and he never gives a speech about how great they are or anything, but comparing to his relationship with his wife I think it may just be because he’s an Early 1960s American Man than anything.

One other thing he did was to “accelerate” his bees to make his bees more intelligent. I don’t know if this was selective breeding or genetic tampering or exposing them to beetronic rays or whatever sci-fi method they could make up, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that through this uplifting of the species, he caused his own doom. The Queen of his smart bees fell in love with him and the hive were intelligent enough that they had her take human form to seduce him. They were smart enough to have their queen take human form! The acceleration that Fields did to these bees is frankly miraculous.

Ben falls for the queen’s lies and allows her to become his lab assistant. He’s not interested in her in a romantic sense (completely monogamous this guy), but he’s an idiot if he didn’t understand that she was trying and he should have done something more about it. I get that he lost a child and wanted to fill that hole, but she’s not so clever as she seems to think she is. But then again, I guess what’s obvious to the audience isn’t always obvious to the characters. I guess I can give Fields the benefit of the doubt that he’s not a complete idiot. Anyway, after the Queen kills his wife as part of her plan, he finally rejects her forcefully enough to put an end to it.

So, yes. I’m going to say that Fields “keeps bees” enough to count as a Fictional Beekeeper. He cares enough about them to devote his life to them and invent sci-fi stuff for them. He’d rank higher if he cared enough to KEEP more, but he still keeps.

Three Honeycomb out of Five. Though, honestly, after the events of the episode I have to assume he probably gave it up.

Mini Marvels was a line of comedic, family-friendly comics retelling Marvel stories in a parodic manner. At some point these stories were declared to take place on Earth-99062. Naturally, that version of Marvel Earth has a Rocket Racer and naturally he is practically a nonentity.

This Rocket Racer only gets one appearance, but he’s in more than one panel. He’s got lines and everything. That’s more than Rocket Ratser got! Hell, that’s more than regular Rocket Racer gets most years…

But anyway, his deal: In this story, a bunch of super-characters are paperboys for the Daily Bugle, and Rocket Racer is among them. When Spider-Man and Venom have some sort of obstacle course contest to prove who is the better paperboy, Bob is the one who provides the exposition to the others about why Spider-Man and Venom are enemies. And, well, that’s it. Look, I said he had multiple panels and lines, I never set he got to be important to the story.

I do think it’s neat that Bob is very excited to see Spider-Man and Venom run the obstacle course. He just likes races, everybody! In every universe.

(When I went back to look at Rocket Ratser, I realized one time I used the phrase Into The Rocketverse to talk about looking at alternate universe Rocket Racers and I definitely like it and will be going back to add it as a tag to the times I’ve done that.)