Eat the City(13)
“Does it spoil?” the woman asks, peering up anxiously at Andrew.
“Like a mother’s love …” he begins.
“Eternal,” she finishes, blinking her eyes and looking moved, as though she could be thinking of her own deep connection with her children. She promises to come back for the thirty-two-ouncer. “It’s really eternal,” she says again as she walks away.
“Different pitches for different demographics,” Andrew says.
WHEN the ban was lifted just before bee season, Andrew had to teach his basic beekeeping class three times over to meet demand. Honey lust consumed the unlikeliest people. Rania Abu-Eid, a lingerie designer at Victoria’s Secret, expected her honey to be light and yellow. “I fantasized about it, and said, ‘Oh, it’ll be like sunshine, that’ll be just like me,’ ” she says. “But it actually came out all dark and complex, which is actually more like me.” Maxine Friedman, a fifty-eight-year-old electrical estimator in sensible lace-up shoes, does not come across as one taken with flights of fancy, but she ordered bees on a whim. “I thought it was a good idea, but when I saw the live insects, I thought, ‘Holy shit.’ ” Vivian Wang, a lawyer, installed three hives on the roof of her twelve-story office building and hung a beekeeping jacket with an attached hood and veil on the inside of her office door. “What case are you billing to?” her boss would joke, as she trooped up the stairs to the roof in her beekeeping suit.
The principal of the elite York Preparatory School on the Upper West Side was inspired by Sherlock Holmes, who retired from solving crimes to keep bees. Five hives were on the roof within a week, and the school suited up, purchasing thirty beekeepers’ outfits with different-size hoods to be small enough for sixth-graders and big enough for seniors. The school custodian, who once kept bees in his native Dominican Republic, watered the bees on weekends. When a twelve-year-old got stung on the ankle, the principal knelt and peeled back the boy’s sock to remove a stinger caught in the thick white cotton. “I’ve only been stung once,” said the student, explaining away his tears. “I’m not completely used to it yet.”
Some beekeepers talked about the sacredness of honey across cultures. Roger Repohl is a longtime beekeeper who lives in the rectory of St. Augustine’s Church in the Bronx, with old china, a cherrywood armoire, and an aging pastor and nuns. Roger, who has almost lashless eyes and parchment-like pale skin, gives talks at the Cloisters on medieval beekeeping. He appreciates the medieval English folk tradition of “telling the bees” about important events, like a death, birth, or marriage, so the bees don’t get affronted and stop producing honey. Once, he found a child’s leather jacket and a child’s pair of shoes draped over the beehive he keeps in a community garden in the rectory’s backyard. “Maybe the child is sick or something and they want to tell the bees,” says Roger. He left the items there for a while, in case the owners came back to retrieve them—but eventually he picked them up off the hive and gave them to Sister Dorothy to dispense to the needy.
Now Roger shows new beekeepers how to extract honey in the rectory’s dark, dank basement licked by flickering fluorescent light. He uses a metal comb to break the wax caps of the honeycomb, like popping bubble wrap. He places the thick white wax sheets in a centrifuge machine that looks like a big metal pot on stilts with a handle and an internal rack for three beeswax frames. He stirs his arm in a circle, faster, faster, until the whirring has its own momentum and he can barely keep up with the motion he began. A dark liquid whips onto the inside of the canister in iridescent streaks and pools in the bottom as the warm scent of honey rises in the room, giving the sense of sunshine bursting underground. Roger ties a ladies’ stocking around the spigot at the bottom of the centrifuge to filter out debris as the honey pours into a white bucket below. And as the stocking fills, it takes the shape it was sewn to take—the shape of a foot—dribbling honey.
When his bees swarmed, Roger thought it a beautiful sight, thousands of them flying off in a cloud. “I think that ‘beekeeping’ is something of a misnomer,” he says. “You can’t keep the bees. If they want to go, they’re going to go.”
More swarms appeared in the city as more amateurs kept bees. One attached to a tree outside a discount clothing store in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn. Wearing a T-shirt and no special protection, Andrew stood in his truck bed, at eye level with a quivering-multiorganism two-foot cone of bees dangling body-to-body. Yellow POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape attached to nearby trees cordoned off Andrew’s entire vehicle. Calm, silent, before a gathering crowd and the crackle of police radios, he worked methodically with two other beekeepers to spray the insects with sticky sugar water to impede their movement, to the bewilderment of onlookers—“It’s poison!” some of them yelled. Then he donned a protective hood, lifted a plastic garbage bin toward the bees, and shook the branch into the dark receptacle.
“Oh, shit, son,” said one man, as thousands of bees dropped into the bin and hewed to the sides of the plastic, coating it with their bodies, making a lining of living bees. And then, with the application of a lid, the bee problem was gone.
“Damn!” said the observer. “They G’s at this, man, they know what they doing.”
As a siren shrieked from a departing squad car, Andrew shook the hand of the lead police officer and drove away, tens of thousands of bees the richer.