The Agrinautica

   As I'm in the middle of an apiary of 80 beehives today, I get a phone call. "'BeekeeperBob' commented on the OC Weekly article, he's telling people we don't actually have any bees."
   I look around at the beehives surrounding me. I've been working on these hives for at least an hour. I look at the bee that is in the very midst of stinging my hand. No bees?!
   It would be funny if it weren't so juvenile and stupid.

   Usually handling these PR issues falls to me. In the business of PR does one usually have to deal with such juvenile antics? But I was out of the office WORKING ON BEES so instead of a comment back from me where I would have tried to set a more positive tone to the conversation, I come home to read the additional comments to the story, where various friends of Dave's have enthusiastically attacked the original commenter. So much for it not being a juvenile melee.

   Anyway, to back up a bit, the comment(s) in question are to a recent article in the county-wide weekly publication "OC Weekly." It focused once again on "bee savers" and basically hosed us from a PR standpoint. Everything said about Dave or our company was prefaced with a pejorative qualifier or dismissive verbage.

   I'll probably post a breakdown of the story later, but for now I don't really want to think about it.



   In better news I looked at another site to situate 80 new hives we're bringing down from Nor Cal next week. The new location we have looks perfect. Additionally, I made the contact, negotiated the contract, visited the site and met the owner and signed the contract all on my own on behalf of Dave, so I feel like I've been invested with some real confidence.


   And also on the plus side, the OC Weekly article quotes "an employee's blog" (in, frankly, I think some of our best appearances in the article! :D ), that, of course, is me. So I can add another feather in my blog-hat: quoted by a publication with a circulation of 77,000. (=