Drunk Beaver Pedal Drop #32 is a really cool Vitalii take on the BJFE Honey Bee - the Okhtyrka Honey Bee Overdrive

I’m a huge fan of BJFE, and consider Björn Juhl a friend. I have several of his pedals across BJFE, OneControl, Mad Professor, and now disassociated brand Bearfoot FX. And several variants of the Honey Bee / Bee / Sweet Honey in both Compact and Mini enclosures.

So I’m super excited to experience Vitalii’s take on the circuit. Notably the original Honey Bee was based on the sound of a massively beaten up and maltreated 60’s Supro Amp.

For the Okhtyrka Honey Bee Vitalii added a Pete Cornish style input buffer (quite a big part of the circuit with the KT3201 transistor), and where the gain stage uses a NOS Tesla MAC157 op-amp (Czech version of CA3130) and Ge + LEDs combo for clipping, the hard clipping diodes are NOS Telefunken SAY-12, with the output FET gain stage biased for J113. The Modes switch essentially changes EQ behaviour : in the upper position it increases low end, and in the lower position it acts as a lowpass filter.

There will be 25 for sale as soon as this article goes live - where they go for $150 on the Drunk Beaver Rocks Webstore.

As I mentioned I’m super excited to see how this compares with the half dozen honey bee variants I have in the collection already. Vitalii definitely has a knack for extracting maximum flavour out of these classic circuits.

The Honey Bee is still a little under-appreciated nowadays, alongside Mentone’s Red Snapper - those are both top-tier overdrive flavours - the deserve wider support.