Eat the City(15)

IN the offices of Arthur Mondella, the owner of Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company, cherry jars adorn every desk, fat globes of fruit floating in syrup in alarming shades of jade and Play-Skool hues of blue and orange. But mostly they’re red, that shrieking, tropical sunset red that tops Manhattans and old-fashioned Cherry Cokes. Red Dye No. 40 is key to the recipe, along with vats of intensely sweet high-fructose corn syrup—Mondella goes through eight million pounds of the stuff a year.

There were always bees, said Mondella, probably since his father and grandfather founded the business in 1948. In the past, he said, small numbers of them would show up to sip some cherry juice in the fall, when few flowers bloom with nectar. Mondella would throw shrink-wrap over the cherry bins as they moved outside among the five factory buildings, and the insects would disappear.

But this year, the bees came in the middle of the summer and didn’t go away. They would crawl under the edges of the wrap, or go for tiny drops of syrup on the plastic. Mondella won’t talk about whether any perished in his syrup—but bees are not swimmers. And Mondella complains that he had to throw away whole vats of cherries. To add insult to injury, he got stung. “I was outside, and we were getting swarms, hundreds of bees,” said Mondella. “Well, it’s not like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. But you’d see a bee. And then there’d be two. And then there’d be three. And then a dozen.”

Soon Mondella learned that new local beekeepers were harvesting red honey. “When a beekeeper opens a bee factory next door, what can you do?” Mondella asked. Fearing that a few big shipments of insect-contaminated cherries could spell the end of his $20 million business, he contacted the Health Department and received only an unhelpful letter. “Talk about aggravating!” He met with officials at the Brooklyn Borough President’s Office, then called a contact in a South Brooklyn business development network, who wrote to Andrew Coté: “The factory is at the end of its rope, losing money, and is looking for a solution short of becoming litigious.” A few days later, Andrew showed up to troubleshoot with Mondella and Steven Leffler, the company vice president.

Nobody around Dell’s cherry factory is unsympathetic to bees in general. Bees are necessary to pollinate cherries, after all. “If you have no bees, you have no pollination, you have no vegetables, you have no wheat, we have no trees, we have no flowers, and we have no world, okay?” says Leffler. The question is, what will make them stop slurping cherry syrup?

Bees are more likely to collect artificial substances when they can’t find the blossoms they depend on, even for a short week or two before the next flowers of the season come into bloom. Could it be that during that particularly scorching July, their natural source of nectar burned out, and they discovered a taste for high-fructose corn syrup that they could not shake? Could it be that after beekeeping was legalized and various new parties took it up, there were too many new bees in a neighborhood with too little forage? Or were Dell’s cherries simply too lusciously sweet to pass up?

Andrew suggests building screens and covering the cherry bins in sheets soaked in water and vinegar—bees hate vinegar.

Mondella particularly likes his own idea of selling the beekeepers feeders of high-fructose corn syrup to set up back at the hives so the bees don’t even venture out toward the factory. “I can sell them as much cherry juice as they want. I’ll give it to them at cost,” says Mondella.

“They wouldn’t want it,” interjects Leffler, guessing the beekeepers won’t approve of corn syrup. “They want natural.”

Okay, then how about planting more nectar flowers, Mondella suggests.

A possibility, muses Leffler. “You have to have vegetation for these bees to feed on,” Leffler says. If you have no flowers for the bees to work, all you get is trouble, he says. “It’s like people who don’t work. You have fifty people standing on the corner, hanging out, what’s going to happen?” he asks, looking around the room. “Trouble,” he answers.

Over a couple weeks, Mondella paid Andrew $250 an hour to examine the Red Hook factory and create a plan to deter bees, as well as to meet with beekeepers, prepare press releases, and field calls from reporters. Andrew was concerned that if the problem was not carefully managed, beekeeping would get a bad name and the ban would be reinstated. The factory had been there for more than sixty years and employed thirty people; the beekeepers were the newcomers. Andrew met the Red Hook beekeepers in a café to hash through solutions. He encouraged them to rein in their charges.

To calculate the ideal number of hives for the neighborhood, you would need to know the number of plants flowering throughout the season, their nectar-producing capacities, when they bloom, the variation in blooms, the weather, the soil sweetness and composition, the numbers and kinds of honeybees, as well as the numbers and kinds of wild bees … Impossible. Still, fewer bees could only help, Andrew reasoned, and he urged the beekeepers to reduce their hives by half, which they agreed to do.

The next summer, there would be fewer bees at the cherry factory, and Red Hook’s honey would be more gold than red.


TRUTH is, we live in a world of easy sugar. You can swelter and sweat tending bees in a head-to-toe heavy cotton-polyester blend, a mask on your face, a hat slipping off your head, yellow netting and smoke in your eyes, even as you hear, tinkling at close range, the melody of the Mister Softee truck peddling swirls of refined and processed cane juice and high-fructose corn syrup. You can fight to extract sweetness from thousands of insects in a wooden box, in sight of a bodega where you can get Mr. Goodbar and Milk Duds, Swedish Fish, Sour Patch Kids, Coke, Minute Maid and Snapple, Pepperidge Farm cookies, and Betty Crocker cake and brownie mix. It’s hard to imagine a time when honey was the only sweet going. When people would go to extraordinary lengths to extract it from natural beehives because they craved that sensation on the tongue.