You’ve heard of your brother’s keeper?

But how about your brother’s beekeeper?

Now you know the story of Arielle Sherman-Golembeski, a recent UConn graduate, “Husky Award” winner on the rowing team for “leadership, friendship and dedication” and accomplished beekeeper.

Sherman-Golembeski of Old Lyme is headed to graduate school at Columbia, where she will further her psychology and human development studies. And maybe do some urban beekeeping in the big, bad city.

Quite the story.

“Beekeeping is cool,” Sherman-Golembeski said recently, uttering, shall we say, an uncommon sentiment. “I got interested in it because of a senior (high school) project. It was overcoming a fear. I didn’t like bees. I wasn’t gung ho at first.”

So it wasn’t like the bees had her at “buzz.” But darn, what happens sometimes when you take the time to learn about other things and expand your comfort zone.

“My mom even got me a suit,” Sherman-Golembeski said.

High school and college, nothing else if not voyages of self-discovery, were quite illuminating for her. Who knew honeybees could be such a road to edification?

“Getting your own hive teaches you the fundamentals of food,” Sherman-Golembeski said. “You see how the grand scheme works. People take for granted where their food comes from and what helps it grow.”

That would be bees, which pollinate crops, among other endeavors.

“Each hive has one queen bee. Then there are females. And drones, which are the males in the hive,” Sherman-Golembeski said. “The males never leave. They mate with the queen and tend to her every need. The female bees get pollen and bring it back to the hive and make royal jelly (used in the nutrition of larvae) to give to the queen.”

Surely, there is some wiseapple, likely of the male gland, who wishes he’d come back as a bee in his next life. Mate all day and never leave home?

(See what you learn here on the sports page?)

Sherman-Golembeski stumbled upon rowing as well. She admits to “not being good at other sports,” so she tried rowing in the seventh grade. It’s maybe the hardest sport of all. Forget that its anaerobic rhythms can make even fit athletes see Jesus in the height of exhaustion. Rowers keep early hours, too.

You may note that there’s not much water on or around the Storrs campus.

“We rowed on a lake in Coventry, about 15 minutes from campus,” Sherman-Golembeski said. “Tuesday and Thursday at 5 a.m., Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. And of course, on our team, being on time meant being five minutes early.”

In her time at UConn, Sherman-Golembeski made the American Athletic Conference’s All-Academic team three times. She was the three seat on the varsity boat that finished sixth among 59 schools last fall at the Head of the Charles.

She also, even if unwittingly, summarized the feelings of rowers everywhere one day on Twitter. UConn officials asked her to sum up her sport in three words.

“Love-hate relationship,” she wrote.

“I don’t know how many times I said, ‘I’m never doing that again or ‘it’s 4 a.m. and I don’t want anything to do with this,’” Sherman-Golembeski said. “But when you’re done, you get this tremendous sense of accomplishment.”

Sherman-Golembeski aspires to a career in social work. Columbia isn’t a bad place to start.

She’s a pretty good illustration, too, about never knowing where life’s rhythms will guide us. Imagine, if as a little kid, her parents told her that the road to salvation runs through a lake at 5 a.m. and a hobby trying to maintain bees.

And yet that’s exactly what has molded her into what she’s become.

Next time you see a bee coming at you … swat not. Think a happy thought for Arielle Sherman-Golembeski.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro