Burt’s Bees

If you’re a fan of the Burt’s Bees line of natural, environmentally friendly personal care products, you might have assumed that the Walt-Whitman lookalike on the label was a generic hippie dreamed up by marketing experts. >> Famous People We’ve Lost in 2015 But Burt Shavitz, who passed away on July 5 at age 80 in Bangor, Maine, was a real person and an actual beekeeper. Here are some intriguing facts about a man who was as wild and free-spirited …

Burt Shavitz, the 79-year-old founder of Burt’s Bees cosmetics, lives the life of a recluse. And he’s very happy about it. “There’s no noise,” Shavitz, 79, told the New York Times by way of describing his 40-acre spread in northern Maine. “There’s no children screaming. There’s no people getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning and trying to start their car and raising hell. Everybody has their own idea of what a good place to be is, and this is …