Eat the City(12)

In a dim, wood-paneled city hearing room in February 2010, gardeners, arborists, community activists, and beekeepers, including Andrew, testified in favor of lifting the ban. No one spoke in opposition. One speaker gave worldwide examples of beekeeping cities—membership is spiking in the London Beekeeping Association; in Paris, there is a rucher école, or hive school, in the Luxembourg Gardens, and hives atop both the Opéra Bastille and the Palais Garnier; the White House that year produced a bumper crop of honey. “Well-tended colonies of pollinators can bring back devastated areas,” said Andrew after the hearing, dressed in a brown blazer and yellow, honey-colored tie. “There are two hundred and fifty types of bees in New York City. I don’t see why it would be so wrong to allow this one type here.”

What Andrew likes to call “the Bitter Ages” ended on March 16, 2010, when the Department of Health repealed the ban.


ANDREW Coté high-jumps up onto the back of the truck bed—no hands. He tosses out five-gallon plastic buckets of pollen and propolis and crates of honey jars. He unloads and reforms a geometry of boxes and fold-out tables and signs that eventually make up his stand at the farmers’ market, where he sells the products of his city-bred bees. It’s seven a.m. and he’s in a good mood; events of the day have not yet annoyed him.

“Your honey right here!” he likes to offer, agilely thrusting a plastic sample spoon toward every person—truth be told, every woman—walking by, a spoon dribbling a thick, sweet yellow that she is forced to catch with her tongue.

“Are you whipped honey?” Andrew will ask a blonde, who turns, initially suspicious, to his sparkling eyes, devilish grin, and sweet offering. She will slowly smile. “You will love it—you will fall in love,” he says, holding her eyes as she puts the spoon in her mouth.

“It’s a polarizing honey,” Andrew will say, presenting buckwheat honey to a woman in a ruffled black skirt. “Some people don’t like it. Wars have been fought and won, fortunes made and squandered, over buckwheat.”

A woman with long black hair wearing frilly peach-colored shorts will approach the table. Where’s she from? Andrew will ask. Singapore, she will say.

“You speak Mandarin?” Andrew will ask. “Fong mi.” He knows the word for “honey” in dozens of languages.

Giggles and honey-buying ensue.

The pollen has to be scooped from a bucket into bottles for sale as an energy booster. Bees collect the high-protein pollen—a coarse powder on the stamen in the center of a flower that contains the plant’s sperm cells—on their legs to feed their young. When they fly from flower to flower, they inadvertently drop bits of it at each stop, fertilizing some of the plants. Back at the hive, Andrew steals it from his bees with a trap that scrapes pollen off their legs. It’s a grainy golden color, each bit of it a different hue, the texture of pet food pellets. It smells faintly of honey but not as sweet. And it smells of something else, deeper and more pungent, the sex of the flower.

The propolis, too, must be transferred to bottles, for sale as an antifungal and antibacterial. Almost crystallized, the color of flames, propolis is a mixture of saps and resins that bees collect from plants and use to seal up their hive—or even to seal up foreign objects that might putrefy in the hive, such as the carcass of a mouse that expires in their midst.

Andrew has everything he needs, down to a spray bottle of water to clean up honey spills. There’s the honey—rural and suburban wildflower, blueberry, buckwheat, linden, whipped, whipped with cinnamon, and New York City honeys sold by the borough where they were harvested. Squares of honeycomb are kept in little clear plastic boxes in a cooler to preserve the wax, so when you bite into it, it’s cold and light, and chewing releases bubbles of honey. Andrew lays down a blue line of painter’s tape on the wood table to make a clean surface on which to set sample honey spoons. He puts out a macabre jar of hundreds of dead bees—Ukrainians buy them to make medicine, he says, though these already look gummy, like decay. He unloads a cash register tray stocked only with two-dollar bills—he likes two-dollar bills. He pulls out a tin smoker for effect, and props up a Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed bear. It’s showtime. A good day at the farmers’ market can easily bring in a thousand dollars in cash.

“Can I answer any honey-related questions?” Andrew asks of a twenty-something woman with a wave of dark hair who is frowning at his display.

She asks what you can do with beeswax and Andrew responds in a single breath: “Chew it like gum cut it up and put it on a cheese platter bake it with salmon serve it with any kind of ice cream.”

As she gets out her wallet, Andrew says, “I’ll give you a two-dollar bill for change because you’re special.”

She laughs. He smiles.

“I told her she’s special,” he says grimly, as she leaves.

“Personally, I’m a huge fan of the New York City rooftop medley,” Andrew will tell people who ask his advice on what to buy. “We have such a bouquet—a plethora of nectar.” But once at a honey tasting, Andrew confessed, “I don’t have such a refined palate for honey. I enjoy them all, but I can’t really tell them apart.”

Soon comes a woman in her fifties with black-rimmed glasses, a streak of white in her black hair, and one of those raspy, seen-everything New York voices.

She says she wants a big container of honey, pointing to the sixteen-ounce bottle, but she doesn’t want to carry it around all day. Andrew suggests the even larger thirty-two-ounce bottle.