Queen Bee Caper: The Adventures of Sam Spade (July 10, 1949)

“Queen Bee Caper” is an episode of The Adventures of Sam Spade, the old-time radio show, first broadcast July 10, 1949. Listen free on Stupid Potato.

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What happens

Sam Spade is hired by the headmistress of an exclusive girls' school to frame a chemistry teacher named Glory Thomas for theft, supposedly at the behest of wealthy benefactress Ursula Kavanaugh, who wants to separate the teacher from her nephew Gerald. When Spade visits Kavanaugh at her penthouse, he learns her true motive: she wants to break up Gerald's romance with Glory. Later, Ursula is found dead, apparently killed by bee stings from her own beehive, and the beekeeper who worked for her is also discovered dead the next morning.

San Francisco, primarily at Miss Wigginton's School for Girls and Ursula Kavanaugh's penthouse apartment

Characters: Sam Spade, Miss Elizabeth Collie, Glory Thomas, Ursula Kavanaugh, Gerald Long, Albert Piggett, Jelonak, Effie

Listen for: The clever parallel between Ursula's observations about honeybee society—where the queen controls thousands of workers with no dissent—and the murders that follow; the significance of the beekeeper's drunken epitaph about queens eventually being deposed by worker bees.

Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.