I tried storing a Database Object in a Bean - bad idea. However, I have an application scope Bean that stores the ReplicaID's of several databases that are called on often so I can open the DB with the replica ID. As a method of the bean I open the database by Replica ID and pass the database object back to the calling method and that works fine. In my application I have a Master DB that contains all the XPages Stuff and it accesses any number of application databases. So I create a view of application in the Master with a document for each application which contains among other things the DB RepID. So the Bean as an Application Scope bean only has to cycle through the list of applications one on load and is now available to everyone in the application. Because the list of applications seldom changes the Bean is only loaded on server start-up or HTTP Restart. I have an admin button on the view of applications that forces an update to the Bean. In any case it sure works nicely and once I had it working I have kept finding additional methods that I wanted to add to the Bean and that becomes a pretty simple task because I have most of the tools already built into the Bean.
I'm not a JAVA Bean expert but making some headway in that direction.