Working outside the cube
Beekeeper, poop scooper breaking out of the traditional-job mold.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Necessity is the mother of invention, and Jason Brown’s need to remove dog waste from his own yard led to the invention of Doodie King.
Tired of having to wipe his lawn clean of his beagle’s waste, Brown started thinking others might have the same complaint. Light bulb blinking over his head, in April 2007 Brown created Doodie King, a lawn-care service that collects the land mines Fido deposits from the well-manicured lawns of central Arkansas dog owners.
Just over a year later, Brown is scooping dog waste in the side yard of a house in the Hickory Grove subdivision in west Little Rock. The homeowners’ two dogs, a border collie named Rita and a bulldog named Jewel, silently watch Brown go about the business of collecting their waste. The yard belongs to one of 33 clients Brown has on a ever-growing list, from clients that pay for his one-time cleanup service to twice weekly services.
“Every yard I have, with the exception of one, I can go into and the dog will hang out while I do my job without the fear of being bitten,” Brown said. “For the most part I see just about every dog on my route, and they are super-friendly.”
Brown and his wife lived in California for about 15 years before moving back to his native Arkansas to start a family.
“I was just working a gig, doing customer service work,” Brown said. “I had to clean up after my dog prior to cutting the grass. The more research I did, I found that this is nasty stuff. I came up with the idea and finally worked up the courage to tell my wife. She said it was a good idea. She loved it.”
While it’s sickening to step in and peppers a green lawn with nasty dead spots in the grass, dog waste also is an environmental hazard. Dogs harbor fecal coliform bacteria, E. coli, salmonella and giardia. The fecal matter can contaminate local water supplies, and dog waste also can include hookworms and tapeworms.
Armed with a big red pooper scooper, a rake and garbage bags, Brown carefully marches a yard in Bretagne Court, collecting the waste of a pair of Labrador retrievers.
“The big debate is whether to use a rake or a shovel,” Brown said. “I believe in using a rake because I don’t want to make divots in somebody’s yard.”
Once he collects the waste, he double bags it in the back of his pickup truck, and then sprays down his shoes, rake and pooper scooper with a disinfectant, eliminating the chance of spreading dog disease or sickness from one yard to the next.
Brown fills three air-tight drums with the dog waste before transporting it to local dumps. He has looked into replacing the garbage bags with biodegradable bags made of corn starch or other materials, but has yet to locate a cost-effective green product to replace garbage bags.
Since quitting his day job in April, Brown usually works 25 hours a week collecting dog waste with the rest of his time spent marketing Doodie King via fliers or talks at homeowners association meetings. A cartoon likeness of Bailey serves as the fledgling company’s face.
It’s an unconventional occupation, but Brown said business is slowly picking up as people become more comfortable with paying a person to clean up dog waste. And he has a standard response when people do the usual double take when he reveals his occupation.
“Most people go, ‘What?’,” Brown said. “You have to break it down real simple: ‘I pick up dog poop.’ I just want to have a nice little living.
“The smell is just one of those things you get used to.”
Much like the U.S. Postal Service, Brown works in the rain, sleet or snow. He tells stories of having to kick frozen dog waste to loosen it from yards in the winter months and working in the early morning hours in the summer to avoid the hottest temperatures. But he loves his new job and its entrepreneurial spirit.
“I like — even when its scorching hot — I love being outside,” he said. “And I love dogs. Basically my customer is a dog. I deal with the owners very little, usually only when I am setting up the service.
“It’s a pretty great lifestyle if you go out and enjoy it.”
KEEPING DIVA BEES
It’s impossible for a beekeeper to name each individual bee, so Sheila Farley has taken to naming her hives and queen bees. There are the Red Hot Peppers and Little Golden Rods hives, as well as the Cajun Queen bee spread among the four Langstroth bee hives located in the backyard of her home tucked off a rural Pulaski County road.
Each hive is a bee hotel, with an entrance through the hive body and access to the hive supers. Inside the hives, the bees continuously crawl over the parallel frames in the supers, creating comb honey, making wax and building cells. The bees swarm at the hive’s entrance, as field bees return from nectar and pollen foraging.
But the bees are more than mere pets; they are the workers who help Farley create her Diva Bees lip balm, available in several flavors and sold at locations across central Arkansas.
Her 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. job is as the chief probation officer at the Little Rock District Court, but Farley’s love is with her hives.
“I’m a newbie beekeeper,” Farley said. “I had been interested and wanted to get into bees.”
A graduate of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with a degree in criminal justice, Farley said she avoided science classes as a student and was “ignorant” about bees when, three years ago, she approached an elderly neighbor who had hives in his backyard.
“I would see him out there tending to them,” Farley said. “Finally one day I went up to him and asked him if he would show me about bees. I started working with him in 2005. He’s been a blessing to me.”
Working with the 84-year-old Jesse Ferguson, Farley slowly learned about honey bees, their pollination and their honey-making and wax-making capabilities.
She soon had her own hives — buying queens off the Internet or rescuing hives — and started using their wax-making abilities to create Diva Bees lip balm.
Farley collects the beeswax from the hive supers, and places it in a solar wax melter before purifying it twice more in her kitchen by mixing it with water and running it through cheesecloth. Once the wax is triple purified, Farley adds flavoring agents, pours the mixture into plastic tubes affixed with her Diva Bees logo and caps it. Flavors range from cinnamon to grape to patchouli, though the lip balm sold inside the University of Arkansas for Medical Science’s Cancer Institute Auxiliary Gift Shop is a neutral flavor.
Farley’s eyes sparkle behind her veil as she slowly pumps her smoker with the smoldering pine needles and burlap placating the bees. Opening the Red Hot Peppers hive, she pulls a frame loaded with bees frantically capping the cells filled with honey. Although her four hives don’t produce enough honey to sell, Farley gently urges me to stick my bare finger into the comb and extract some honey.
“Then you can see how wonderful it is,” she said.
Using my index finger I scrape honey from the comb and step back from the hive. After Farley reminds me to remove my veil, I taste the honey. It’s sweet, fresh and all natural, but better yet, I didn’t get stung.
Bee stings are one of the risks associated with being a beekeeper, and while Farley doesn’t appreciate the pin pricks from the bees, she accepts it.
“These are my girls,” Farley said like a doting mother talking about her small children who can do no wrong.
Those same loving eyes are a little sad when she describes how one of her hives disappeared last year, perhaps the victim of colony collapse disorder.
“I just came out here one day, opened up the hive and they were gone,” she said.
Although the loss of the hive was stunning and devastating, Farley has created a bee sanctuary in her backyard, planting winter honeysuckle, blackberry bushes and grape vines for her bees, and protecting them from pests such as spiders and mites.
While Farley cherishes her bees, the relationship is a two-way street with the bees’ work giving Farley a second, more-unusual-than-her-first job.
“The more you learn about bees the more you love them,” she said. “It was just something in my heart that led me to work with bees. It’s been wonderful.”
Comments
Post a comment
(Requires free registration.)