Burt Shavitz, the man whose face is on your minty Burt’s Bees chapstick and body wash, died on Sunday in Bangor, Maine. He was 80.

NPR’s Elizabeth Blair reports that Shavitz’s death was as a result of respiratory complications.

“We remember him as a wild-bearded and free-spirited Maine man, a beekeeper, a wisecracker, a lover of golden retrievers, a reverent observer of nature, and the kind of face that smiles back at us from our Hand Salve,” the company says in a statement.

Burt’s Bees says that before Shavitz became a beekeeper in Maine, he was a photojournalist freelancing in New York City, documenting key figures in the civil rights movement, beat poets and artists in the 1960s.

When TV became popular, Shavitz realized that there wasn’t a big market for his photos anymore, The Daily Beast wrote in 2013.

It adds that:

“In 1970, Burt threw his mattress in his Volkswagen van and, along with a few buddies, drove upstate to the High Falls, New York, area. After a series of heavy rainstorms, Burt decided to drive around and survey the damage. He stumbled upon a swarm of bees on a fencepost.

” ‘The year before, a guy that I’d been buying honey from, who was a beekeeper, had given me everything I needed to be a beekeeper except the bees — a hive, a mask, gloves, a smoker, a hive tool, everything,’ Burt recalls. ‘So, there was this fencepost, and I said, “My lord, this is an act of God! I can’t turn this down.” ‘ “

Burt’s Bees began in 1984 when Shavitz met an artist named Roxanne Quimby. According to the company’s web site, Quimby “was thumbing a ride home (back when you could still do that sort of thing). Eventually a bright yellow Datsun pickup truck pulled over, and Roxanne instantly recognized Burt Shavitz, a local fella whose beard was almost as well-known as his roadside honey stand. Burt and Roxanne hit it off, and before long, Roxanne was making candles with unused wax from Burt’s beehives. They made $200 at their first craft fair; within a year, they’d make $20,000.”

The company grew and moved its headquarters to Durham, N.C., in 1993. But Shavitz’s partnership with Quimby unraveled in the late 90s. The Daily Beast, citing Shavitz and a documentary titled Burt’s Buzz, says the two reached a settlement after Quimby found out Burt had an affair with a college-age girl who worked at one of the Burt’s Bees stores.

Quimby eventually bought out Shavitz. Burt’s Bees is now owned by the Clorox Company.

Here’s the trailer for Burt’s Buzz. It’s a small window onto the life of the unorthodox man who, as Elizabeth reports, “co-founded a skincare company that began with beeswax.”

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China’s central bank will provide an injection of cash for the state-run margin finance company, as the country’s top brokerages pledge to go on a share-buying spree to prop up faltering markets that have lost a third of their value in less than a month.

Some analysts estimate the total margin-lending in the world’s second-largest economy is $645 billion. As The Guardian noted last week, the falling share prices have triggered margin calls. “Investors and policymakers are looking on with fear because if those margin calls continue, investors will have to offload other assets to come up with the cash they need,” the newspaper writes.

Although the People’s Bank of China — the country’s central bank — has lowered interest rates, that has done little to stanch the bleeding. The sudden sell-off, which started in mid-June, followed a seven-month period that saw Chinese share prices double.

So far, 69 Chinese mutual funds have said that they will invest to stabilize the stock market, according to Reuters.

The news agency writes that “almost $3 trillion in market value — more than the entire economic output of Brazil — has been wiped out since markets went into reverse last month, posing a bigger headache for many global investors than even the Greek debt crisis.” It notes that the 30 percent drop on the main Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index, or SHCOMP, was “especially worrying because the bull market had been built on a mountain of speculative loans.”

The Hong Kong-based daily South China Morning Post says it is “sparking a crisis of confidence among investors who now believe the downward spiral will last some time.”

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that:

“Senior officials from the State Council, China’s cabinet, the central bank, its top securities regulatory agency and other financial agencies held a meeting Saturday to discuss another round of measures to help arrest the stock slide, according to people with knowledge of the matter. …

“Chief among the decisions made is to halt new initial public offerings in a bid to preserve liquidity in an increasingly volatile market, the people said. Officials also discussed the setup of a market-stabilization fund.”

As NPR’s Frank Langfitt reported in 2013, the central bank has been keen to rein in rampant and risky lending, which is fueled largely by a real estate bubble and speculation in tech stocks.

Meanwhile, the country’s rate of economic growth, while still robust by Western standards, has fallen to its lowest pace in a quarter century.

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