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By Root 606 0

and home-accessory products to be manufactured overseas, then brought back to the United States to be sold at trade shows and at our retail shop in Greenwich Village. The best part of my job was researching and shopping for 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 manufacturing 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 palatable 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 realized that where I really wanted to be was back in the bee-yard. The exhilarating experience 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 obligation of my work often took me away from home for several weeks at a time. Who would care for my bees while I was gone? Would they starve, or miss me? Did they need special attention? Clearly, I needed to learn more.

That morning, the train was late, so I wandered inside the station house. This particular station house had no seats, but did have a free, communal book rack where commuters could take and leave books as they passed through the station. The books gave the station a cozy feeling. I perused the rack as I waited, and a red book with the word “beekeeper” 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 book 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 book. A huge Sherlock Holmes fan, I was fascinated and charmed by the story, in which Holmes meets a young intellectual woman studying bee behavior. They partner together for adventures in sleuthing and beekeeping. Life was imitating art: I was like the young apprentice to my own Holmes, Mr. B. Was this story a sign of what my future held? My destiny was calling, and I was beginning to feel I had to respond.

• • •

FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS, I continued my regular commute back and forth to the city, working on new product designs and selling them at the store until it was time for one of my regular trips to China. At this point I had been to China twice a year for almost six years to source out and oversee manufacturing of our company’s giftware designs. I was working at a factory in a small, remote city outside of Huangzhou, approving the final details of some new products. It was a sweltering day in China; the humidity was sky-high, and the air dense. My associate Mr. Wang offered to take me to his favorite noodle house for lunch. On the way, I noticed a few ragged handmade tents alongside the dirt road. In front of one tent stood a dozen beehives. The streets of China are always full of unexpected surprises, and if I had not still had bees on the brain, I might have walked right by without giving them a second thought. Instead, I stopped dead in my tracks and stared as though I had discovered the eighth wonder of the world.

“Mr. Wang, those are honeybees hives!”

Mr. Wang was puzzled by my excitement. As we drew closer, I could hear the low hum of bees at work. I asked Mr. Wang if it was okay for me to watch for a few minutes. The wooden