Eat the City(11)
It turns out that New York City bees have long caused problems for sweets manufacturers. In 1905, a beekeeping supply store was keeping twenty-eight hives on its roof on Vesey Street in Manhattan, near two big candy factories. The bees flew into the boiling room of one of the factories through windows kept open “on account of the great heat within,” wrote the New York Times. They sucked up what sustaining sugary liquids they could find, stinging workers who stood in the way, as well as a Board of Health inspector conducting too assiduous an investigation. The Times reported that the factory owner had “lost a lot of sleep lately figuring up how much sugar he has been robbed of to keep a colony of 3,000,000 bees.”
Bees at City College in 1911 produced honey as green as pistachio ice cream. “Who outside of a nature-faker’s book ever heard of green honey?” asked the president of the college, John Huston Finley. For a time, he suspected the bees of robbing chemicals from a biology laboratory, but then identified their more likely source as a candy kitchen on Amsterdam Avenue. Finley hatched a complicated scheme to get to the bottom of the matter: He would brand each bee in the college hive with red marks on its breast and its belly, and have his students, along with boys from the nearby Hebrew Orphan Asylum and girls from the neighboring Convent of the Sacred Heart, track the bees and race to the biology department to report each sighting. What could go wrong? The results of the survey are lost to history, and no one seems to have extended the inquiry to the cooks of the candy kitchen, who might have noticed bees in their recipes.
Still, at that time, people valued city honey. In an era with little regulation and much concern about doctored foods, people feared that distant rural beekeepers might stretch the honey by adding glucose and yellow coloring. Eaters of city-made honey, on the other hand, could “see it taken from the combs and go home satisfied that they are getting the genuine bees’ product,” wrote the New-York Tribune in 1900. Besides, beekeeping was the kind of homely project that could be as useful for city-dwellers as anyone else. Orphanages around town harvested their own honey to make cheap sweets for the children. As late as the 1950s, hospitals and private medical practices in Manhattan sometimes kept hives on the roof to use bee stings for arthritis therapy, until cortisone was discovered.
Yet 1920s Manhattan, filled with early, exhaust-spewing cars and coal-fueled engines, began to present particular hazards for bees. The manager of a beekeeping supply store on Chambers Street set up a hive in the store’s window, but his bees produced a muddy honey from the city’s sooty flowers. Decades later, the secretary of the City’s Department of Air Pollution Control asked the same man to set up hives once again, in order to prove levels of soot had diminished. But the apiaries gradually disappeared as the city got fuller and dirtier, leaving few beekeepers to protest when eventually their practice was banned.
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IN 1999, the administration of Mayor Rudy Giuliani added honeybees to a list of over one hundred wild animals, including hyenas, pit vipers, and dingoes, considered too dangerous for urban life. Article 161 of the health code thereafter prohibited the “possession, keeping, harboring and selling” of bees. It’s not clear why the City suddenly outlawed honeybees after a long history in which the insects and their keepers had not been mentioned in the rules and were bound only by state regulations. It could have been part of the mayor’s crackdown on all things people fear. When people think of bees they don’t envision the gentle forager collecting nectar for her sisters, but an angry swarm buzzing after a frantic victim who jumps into a pond.
The outlaw status of the urban hive helped impart commercial cachet. A man named David Graves was the first to realize he could charge more money at the farmers’ market for his clandestine urban honey. Tending hives throughout the city was a logistical challenge, so David took on a helpful apprentice, a New York City taxi driver from Haiti who agreed to drive him around in exchange for training. By the time Andrew Coté came into the business, David had established the rules of underground pro urban beekeeping: Never reveal the location of a city hive. Supplement your sales of the rare urban honey with quantity from hundreds of hives in the suburban and rural outskirts of town. Charge more for honey from the city.
Some risk was involved, as the City continued to issue fines. In 2009, officials carried out fifty-three inspections in response to calls related to harboring bees and wasps, and issued thirteen notices of violation and fines of two hundred to two thousand dollars.
A New York nonprofit called Just Food, which helps city people produce and access fresh food, organized to reverse the ban. Minneapolis, Denver, and Helena, Montana, were legalizing beekeeping: Why not New York? Soon hundreds of people dressed as bees were dancing at a fund-raising Beekeepers’ Ball. Restaurants and bars added to their menus special cocktails, desserts, and entrées using local honey. People rallied on the steps of City Hall carrying signs that read “BEE FABULOUS!” and “THERE IS NO EXISTENCE WITHOUT BEEING.”
Andrew, for his part, had doubts. He worried that in a tightly packed city such as New York, clueless amateurs—“yahoo cowboy and cowgirl beekeepers”—could create serious problems and give all of beekeeping a bad name. Yet as talks progressed, Andrew and other beekeeping advocates sat in on several closed meetings in drab downtown buildings with Department of Health personnel. Together, they hammered out the details: Should the number of hives on a block be restricted? What sort of training should be available for beekeepers? Would registration be required?