Eat the City(5)

New York City outlawed beekeeping in 1999, and for a decade afterward, a clandestine apiarist culture survived despite the risk of a $2,000 fine for an illicit hive. People put up screens and walls and grew foliage to hide the hives in their gardens. On rooftops, they painted hives gray to look like air conditioning units, or red, like chimneys. After removing frames of honey, they wrapped them in garbage bags and sealed them with duct tape before carrying them, quietly buzzing, into public view. They hosted underground honey tastings and sold their wares in boutique groceries. At most, there were a few dozen beekeepers in the city, and the hobby seemed to attract lone eccentrics, such as a Brooklyn drag performer who sold honey under his female alias, and a man in the Bronx who lived in a rectory and had learned beekeeping from a Trappist monk. Finally when beekeeping became legal again in 2010, new beekeepers emerged in force.

Often they’re in it for the honey. City honey is an edible record of available nectar in the urban landscape, and a discerning palate can see and taste the distinctive flavors of different neighborhoods. A complex and nuanced South Bronx honey comes from bees feasting on flora at the nearby botanical garden. A Manhattan East Village honey, pale with a minty taste from bees working the linden trees, has hints of apple, peach, and rose, from the many community gardens. A Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, honey is heavy from the Echinacea flowers of a local garden and from Prospect Park itself. In some neighborhoods, the honey is so sweet, it’s overwhelming: sharp, almost acid. In others, it is light, high, citrusy, and tangy. Elsewhere it’s musky and indistinct—or nutty, spicy, with a bitter aftertaste. Hives near one another generally produce similarly flavored honeys, so that if you were to map a particular city’s honey flavors, you would see gradually shifting regions determined by prominent nearby flowers. It’s even easier to track the changing flavors of honey throughout the season as various flowers bloom and fade. Early honey, from clover and the spring-flowering trees, is light in color and flavor, and the later stuff from goldenrod in the fall has a deep hue with a heavy taste.

Some newer beekeepers have been moved to the hobby by tales of colony collapse disorder, the name for a phenomenon in which whole colonies of bees disappear. The cause has not yet been fully determined, but studies point toward systemic pesticides. Farmers and commercial beekeepers, whose bees pollinate agricultural crops, began to talk about a dearth of pollinators to produce fruits and vegetables across the country. Urban bees were less affected, and some city people began to tend their own hive in hopes that they could somehow bolster the species. A sense of crisis in beekeeping peaked just as New York City legalized the practice. Interest soared.

Urban beekeepers all over the country do what Andrew does: They are swarm wranglers, bee dealers, hive inspectors, club leaders, beekeeping teachers, honey sellers. But most major cities that allow beekeeping have a long-standing institution with a stable community to manage problems. In Chicago, a nonprofit cooperative contracts with City Hall to manage the hives on its roof. In San Francisco and Seattle, volunteer organizations have collected swarms for decades. But in New York, all this is new, and Andrew Coté is often the one to educate, mediate, and trap wayward bees. The recent legalization of urban beekeeping unleashed a wave of pent-up interest from aspiring beekeepers, fans of bees, and the media. These days, Andrew often works with a pack of acolytes in tow, a microphone clipped to his T-shirt and a lens trained on his face.

Andrew’s own group for hobbyist beekeepers, the New York City Beekeepers Association, grew to 300 active members in just a few years following legalization. He alone trained 320 people in beekeeping in two years, while a competing beekeeping meet-up group trained another 400. Perhaps New York has become the city with the most interest in urban beekeeping in the history of beekeeping in American cities. But bees are wild creatures that cannot be tamed, and that can create unforeseen problems—interpersonal problems that require diplomacy not generally associated with keepers of honeybees. Problems that are, so to speak, sticky.

At thirty-nine years old, Andrew is fit, strong, and tightly strung. He’s classically handsome enough that a modeling scout signed him up while he was working at his market honey stand, and he ended up starring in a Goldman Sachs ad. He has a flirtatious sparkle in his eye, a quick grin, a quicker wit, a handy touch, a low tolerance for error, and moods that shift as quickly and totally as a sudden storm. He has worked as a community college professor of English but also spent time in Iraq. He doesn’t like to talk about what he did there, but he came back in 2006 with post-traumatic stress disorder and Monday-afternoon appointments with a shrink. Now he seems to lack the self-corrective feature that makes human interaction bearable. He can be incredibly dedicated: When a bus hit his cargo van last spring while he was delivering bees, the bloodied Andrew, covered in broken glass and lying on a gurney by an ambulance, phoned other beekeepers to come pick up their packages. Yet he also punches people when he’s mad. He tears up when he’s sad. He writes vengeful emails to strangers. Fellow beekeeper David Selig says, “He’s like an angry bee.”

· · ·


ONE late-summer day in 2009, David Selig—shirtless, barefoot, hot—stepped out onto the deck off his bedroom, climbed a utility ladder up to the roof, coffee mug in hand, and tiptoed across the scalding silver surface to visit his bees. He had already collected early honey from two hives he had installed on his roof in the spring: It had been a pale tawny color, strained of all flavor but a newborn sweetness, like the first clover blossoms. But now, as he settled with his coffee, squatting near the entrance of the hive, he noticed something strange. The foragers flying back from gathering nectar were glowing in the late-afternoon light, incandescent, as though lit up by an internal red bulb.