The History of the Hive
Coming together to work on a craft for Humboldt’s Kinetic Grand Championship was a solution to the isolation that some of us felt while sheltering in place during the worst of the COVID pandemic. Some of us in the group have some chronic health issues that made us extra careful about getting together with, well, ANYBODY else outside of our households. Once we were vaccinated, and felt a bit safer, we realized that we needed a way to figure out how to interact with each other like humans again.
Deciding to do the race started with people who have been friends since freshman year at UC Davis. Buffy Tanner and Jess Baldwin were freshman year roommates, and Dave Schoch lived on the same floor (and eventually married Jess). Dave Tanner came along in our sophomore year (and eventually married Buffy). Buffy and Dave had chanced upon the Humboldt Bay portion of KGC in 2012. (First thought: what the hell is this? Second thought: oh, we have to tell Dave and Jess about this!) The four of us had some skills between us: Dave Schoch is a mechanical engineer and loves to build stuff, Dave Tanner is artistic and loves a good project (and can build stuff), Jess was a Design major as an undergrad, and Buffy likes a good spreadsheet (and power tools).
We started planning the craft via Zoom, and once we felt comfortable getting together in person, we worked on building, modifying, and testing the craft over the course of 2021 and early 2022. Add in family members, other old friends from college, and friends from work, and we found ourselves with a 32 member team that ranged in age from 4 to 88. Most of us live in the Bay Area/Sacramento region, but some of us are from Redding, CA and we even have team members from the state of Washington! Everyone who lived within a 200 mile radius helped build and/or test the craft, and 19 of us actually rode the craft in shifts during the 3-day race, the rest of the team were un-bee-lieveably supportive. Memorial Day weekend 2022 was AWESOME, and before the weekend was over, we had commitments from the team to do it again (and had already booked the campground) for 2023!
We Beelieve
Why did we choose the name “Plan Bee”?
We went through a lot of design ideas before choosing bees as an artistic theme. We had access to free 55-gallon plastic drums that we knew we could use as flotation devices, but it took awhile to decide how to decorate them. In 2022, we had four 55-gallon barrels. In 2023, we are using EIGHT 30-gallon barrels – a veritable swarm! Will we have sixteen in 2024? Wait and see…
The barrels as bees are stylish AND functional. Many teams use blow-up pontoons for the water portions of the race. With the attached barrels, we don’t have to spend a lot of time adjusting our craft when we go in or out of the water. Plus, the bees are just frickin’ adorable, thanks to Jess’ design. We had a long list of punny names associated with bees to vote on (thanks to Andrew Brosnan), and the top vote getter was Plan Bee. Plan Bee was also appropriate as we tried out different mechanical designs, tested them, and then realized we needed to tweak them, essentially…a plan b.