Eat the City(10)
He scowls.
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BAFFLEMENT is part of tending bees. Often you don’t know something is wrong until they die, and when they die it can be hard to figure out why.
When David Selig found his red-light bees producing scarlet honey, he was concerned enough to call Andrew. “Interesting,” Andrew said. He’d never heard of anything like it.
So David consulted other hobbyist beekeepers in his Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn to find out if they had similar experiences. He was surprised to learn that every single one of them had recently found bees flying back to the hive aglow. And like his, their honey was a sickly, shiny red. At least a dozen hives in Red Hook and nearby Governors Island were affected. “I was dejected,” Yeshwant Chitalkar, a first-time beekeeper, later told a reporter. “The bees looked like vampires.”
Were the bees ill? Were their hives infested? Or—and this seemed most likely, given that you could see the red stuff through the transparent membrane of their honey stomachs as they flew back to the hive—had they imbibed something other than nectar? David knew his bees could be voracious. Once, he left a single frame of honey in his car, without noticing that the window was open. On his return, “I realized that the car was filled with bees. They were darting at me,” he said. “I opened the trunk. It was like it exhaled bees. They were really just dive-bombing at me to get me away. So I drove around with my beekeeping hood and gloves for a few minutes, just to get them out of the car.”
David had chosen to move to the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn a few years prior because it was a forgotten peninsula, a rare New York City neighborhood where he could own a two-story redbrick row house with a rooftop view of water within a hundred feet in three directions. Here, the air smells cleaner, the temperatures are moderate, and the dead-end waterfront streets give the sense of a sleepy village. Once Red Hook had been the mouth of the great port city, and then it became one of the most industrialized areas of a working industrial city. The thick concrete ribbon of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and a giant block of public housing projects had functioned as a preservative, dividing the neighborhood from developments in mainland Brooklyn and freezing it in time. The offspring of generations of stevedores remain on the strip closest to the water, joined by arty newcomers like David and Cecilia.
Such a land contains myriad red nectars that could fool bees with flowerlike sweetness. Was the bees’ sweet source a tree resin, or perhaps sumac? David found that mentioned in a nineteenth-century beekeepers’ manual on Google Books. Dyed sugar syrup from a hummingbird feeder? Maybe even antifreeze from the school bus yard up the street? Ethylene glycol is sweet and often dyed. But as soon as it occurred to him, David knew this must be the answer: the maraschino cherry factory on Dikeman Street.
The unnaturally red honey in the Red Hook hives didn’t taste like cherries, but neither do maraschino cherries, really, and the honey did taste supersweet.
To be positive, a slight, pale young beekeeper named Tim O’Neal sent a sample of the red substance in the hives to the state apiculturalist for testing. He also went to the monthly meeting of the New York City Beekeepers Association to find out if others had the same problem.
The meeting takes place in an upstairs room at the Seafarers & International House on Fifteenth Street in Manhattan. Afterward, Andrew Coté, the head of the association, fields a bedlam of queries. A girl selling T-shirts for the association asks Andrew for change, and he pulls out a billfold of hundred-dollar bills held together by a rubber band. Two Albanian men in suits introduce themselves as beekeepers recently relocated to Staten Island who want to become members. “We got to registrate, or what we got to do?” And then there’s Tim. “So about the red syrup I collected,” he begins. “I’m worried. But what I wanted to ask—if you hear of anyone else who has this red honey—”
“Okay, okay.” Andrew nods dismissively.
While waiting for test results, David Selig does some legwork of his own. The maraschino cherry factory is a block and a half from his place, and when he walks by, he can see workers wearing long-sleeved hoodies with the hoods on, despite the heat, and swatting at the bees around their heads as they hose down big plastic cherry syrup vessels. Just as David has a red honey problem, it seems the cherry factory has a bee problem.
And then the results of tests on the sample come back from the state lab: The honey contained Red Dye No. 40, a defining ingredient in maraschino cherries.
HONEY is seen as something pure and natural, but bees are foragers whose guiding principle is: the sweeter the better. One beekeeper in Long Island who lived next to a candy factory saw his bees make their hive a rainbow of high-fructose corn syrup in red, blue, and green. According to apiarist lore, another beekeeper who lived near a chewing gum factory in Syracuse found that his bees produced a lovely, delicate spearmint-and winter mint– flavored honey—which he sold as mint flower honey until he realized its origin.
Rural beekeepers across the country say they have seen their charges sip from a leaking valve at a sugar refinery, or feast on liquid used to make cotton candy, or drink from melted snow cones, or suck up Coca-Cola for deposit in the honeycomb. Instead of pollen, bees have been known to gather fine yellow wood shavings from lumberyards, cornmeal from animal feed, and grain dust from mills. Yet most foreign substances, salubrious or not, do not have a telltale neon color to flag them in the hive. Who will be the wiser if they simply blend with the honey?