Sara Hothes is a Senior Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer and a beekeeper.
Both roles have more in common than you might expect: in both, she looks for mistakes. At work, she looks for bugs so that her team can release a product it is proud of. At the hives, she checks whether anything in the colony could stop it from surviving.
Working with both products and bees requires patience and calm when time is short or the situation is stressful, whether a product deadline is near or a swarm is angry. As Sarah puts it: “You just need to keep working, and you need to stay calm, and you need to do your job, and you need to figure out what is best in the given situation.”
Each year brings new weather and new problems, so she keeps learning and looking for better ways to work, for herself and for the bees.
Watch Sarah's story and see how she works with bugs in more ways than one.
Good beekeeping, Sarah explains, starts with observation. From outside the hive, she can see whether bees return with pollen on their legs, which means there are young bees to feed. If they do not, the queen may be missing, or the colony may lack space or be preparing to swarm.
Sarah also listens carefully to the sound of the wings, and she notices the smell of wax from several metres away. She only steps in when something is wrong, because the bees need peace.
Even a frame put back in the wrong place means extra tidying for them; more work for the whole team.
Sarah does for our products what a beekeeper does for a hive. As a Senior Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer, she inspects them regularly, so small problems are found early and our users never see them.
“If I have something that is not working properly, I try to change it to make it work in the way that I need it to work. And it’s not different from the bees.”
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