Queen Bee is an intimate portrait of Roxanne Quimby and a masterful history of the north woods.
It's the story of a young woman who fled a domineering father, a rootless childhood, and suburban suffocation. She and her young man and their dog drove cross-country to San Francisco in 1970 looking for a new way of being in the world. Five years later they spent their meager savings on cheap land in Maine and joined the homesteading movement.
It's the story of a single mother and aspiring artist weighed down by back-to-the-land poverty. Tired of being cold, sick of hauling water and working dead-end jobs, she met a reclusive beekeeper and started making beeswax candles for craft fairs. Then she developed a beeswax lip balm, and what happened next seems plausible only in hindsight.
It's the story of a businesswoman who created the world's leading manufacturer of natural skin-care products from her creative imagination. With no business background, no capital, no investors, and no line of credit, she clawed her way to front-of-store displays in America's top retailers. She was a master of product creation and branding, a master of marketing. She hit the surging interest in natural products at exactly the right time, and she had the smarts to recognize it and the determination to capitalize. She reinvented her company again and again, asking no quarter and giving none, and she sold Burt's Bees for several hundred million dollars after twenty years of single-minded effort.
And it's the story of a retired, wealthy capitalist who feels called to restore some portion of the north woods wilderness and create a new national park. Pursuing her new mission with her old determination, she has run into nail-spitting opposition from the paper industry's dying order.
Queen Bee is the multifaceted story only Phyllis Austin, with her thirty years of north woods reporting and her two years of direct access to Roxanne Quimby, could have written.