Sweet Bee

The Bee People fled a supernova aboard the Hive, their colony ship, and Sweet Bee is the scout who flies ahead of it to find somewhere to land. She has pink wings, antennae and a yellow flight helmet with antennae of its own, and she is the face of her people in both of their episodes.

Mattel had her first, as a 1986 Princess of Power figure whose only weapon was a shield, and the cartoon gave her a job to go with the wings: reconnaissance, alone, far from home.^[1]

Bob Forward wrote "Sweet Bee's Home," and its first cruelty comes before anyone has met her. Her scout craft reports good air and plenty of water, a trooper tells Hordak it is unarmed and on a peaceful mission, and Hordak has it shot down anyway. Adora and Prince Adam see the shot, and as She-Ra and He-Man they gather Mermista and Frosta and ride the swan Enchanta to the Polar Sea, where She-Ra and Mermista dive past a robot crawdad and pull the pilot out.^[2]

Once her helmet is off, Sweet Bee explains herself plainly: "I was just looking for a new planet to settle." The whole Hive is already on its way behind her, which leaves She-Ra with the hard part, telling her that Etheria is ruled by the Horde. Shadow Weaver makes it worse. Using the captured ship, she answers the Hive as if she were Sweet Bee and tells them, "The planet is peaceful, with friendly people. Come ahead," and Hordak counts on ten thousand new slaves.

The rebels storm Hordak's hangar to take the ship back, but the radio is gone and the rockets are wrecked. Sweet Bee still has her steering jets, and She-Ra has an idea: "There's more than one way to get into space." She and He-Man get under the ship and push it into the sky by hand, a silly image and a good one, and Sweet Bee flies off to warn her people.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Assault on the Hive (She-Ra: Princess of Power, 1987), 5:10 to 6:15, 1 minute 5 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

The Bee People return in "Assault on the Hive," still without a planet. She-Ra offers the Bee People a place in the Rebellion and Sweet Bee turns it down: "My people are not fighters. We must look elsewhere." Skeletor has other ideas. He sees the Hive, decides the Bee People would make an army big enough to take on Horde Prime, and boards it with Beast Man and Trap Jaw, using sleep gas and stun rays because, as he puts it, "they're going to be joining my army soon."

Sweet Bee gets out in a scout craft and finds She-Ra, who calls in He-Man, and Swift Wind, too slow for space, calls Crystal Sun Dancer to carry them to the Hive. Aboard the Hive, Trap Jaw has turned the Bee People's building tools into guns, a giant dinosorb rolls at Skeletor, She-Ra nets Beast Man, and Skeletor escapes to Snake Mountain. The Bee People still need a home at the end, but this time they decide it is worth defending, and they join the Rebellion.

The Filmation series is the canon this encyclopedia follows, and Sweet Bee has very little to her name anywhere else. She is not among the princesses in the cast Netflix announced for its 2018 She-Ra reboot, and she arrived too late for The Secret of the Sword, the 1985 film that introduced She-Ra. The Dolph Lundgren movie leaves her out, and she is not in the 2026 film.

Masters of the Universe Classics returned to Sweet Bee in 2014, as a Club Etheria subscription figure that took her hair and face from the cartoon. Its pink wings follow the vintage design closely and sit on joints that let them swing and rotate, and she comes with the Great Rebellion shield, a new stinger gun and a second head wearing the flight helmet from her episodes. The vintage doll and the Classics figure are both retired, and neither is sold new at BigBadToyStore today.