Eat the City(6)
Something unusual had clearly affected his bees. David is a calm person: He’s thoughtful, low-voiced, he is not rash. He finished his coffee, noting the disconcerting beauty of his red bees in the sun, like living, moving warning lights. Then he stepped back down the ladder and went inside to Google “red bees.” The search turned up nothing much—Red Bee comics, Red Bee crafts, Red Bee Media. When he went back to the roof to check the hives, the bees no longer looked red, the honeycomb seemed fine, and he chose to assume that whatever had been amiss, had passed.
David was in love with honey. Not just the sweetness, but the way it connects you with the place where you are, since bees, collecting nectar and pollen from flowers, skim what they need from any environment and transform it into something you can taste. When he traveled to Syria, Turkey, and Jamaica, he would taste the honey, seek out beekeepers, and find that often, through their bees, they noticed changes in botany and climate, industry and agriculture, that others did not. “I enjoy observing nature,” David would say when he got stung and his skin swelled and reddened with a rush of blood. Bees had first fascinated him when he was a child helping to keep them during summers at his grandparents’ farm in Ontario, Canada. More recently, David, a restaurateur with chains of successful eateries, had opened a kind of honey bar for wholesalers where people could sample single-varietal honeys on wooden blocks, such as wild lavender honey from Provence, fragrant and incredibly light and dry on the tongue. Ultimately, he sold the place after it was featured in a magazine and he was flooded with hundreds of orders a day. “Honey doesn’t pour quickly,” he said. “We just couldn’t even keep up with orders.”
When he finally decided to buy his own house with his girlfriend, it seemed natural to ask Andrew Coté to provide materials for two white wood-frame hives for David to install on the rooftop.
David didn’t see a red bee again until the next year, during his second summer in the house, when day after day the thermometer edged over 90 degrees. Beekeeping had just become legal, and others with new hives in the neighborhood were worried about the heat. David’s girlfriend, Cecilia Dean, a fashion muse and editor of an avant-garde magazine, parked herself under the ceiling fan, the dog, Mott, lolled with his tongue out, the two cats barely moved, and David went to check on his charges on the roof. He stepped through the threshold of Cecilia’s museum-like walk-in closet—packed with vintage Helmut Lang and Martin Margiela suits, custom-made gifts from Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs, spiky stilettos from Nicholas Kirkwood and thigh-high boots from Balenciaga—and onto the deck. He climbed the ladder to the roof, and as he sat with his soy latte to enjoy watching the bees, he noticed that they were again glowing red.
He jammed scraps of wood and twine for burning into his beekeeper’s smoker, a metal device like a bellows that breathes a cool, pleasant-smelling smoke that has a calming effect on bees. Then he banged away at the propolis, the sticky substance the bees use to close up the hive. He pried off the lid with a flat-headed tool, directed the smoke toward the bees within, and pulled out a frame from inside. Reassuringly, it was heaving with honey. But the substance looked unusually dark. And when he held it up to the morning sun, he saw that the honey was an untrue, electric shade somewhere between fuchsia and scarlet. He pulled out frame after frame of the second hive, only to find the same. And there were his bees, flying back to their hives, bright red lights themselves, to efficiently deposit the neon nectars of their labors, leaving blazing droplets like so many scattered pomegranate seeds on the white wood.
“Then you freak out,” David said.
A bee’s-eye view of New York City shows a landscape if not lavishly fecund, then sufficient. Whole dizzying blocks have been planted to produce the intensely sweet blossoms of magnolia trees, the fragrant florets of linden trees, the curling pink flowers of cherry trees, and the cloudlike white cluster blooms of ornamental pear trees. In backyards of brownstones and row houses are azaleas and rhododendrons and lilacs; in apartment windowsill boxes and fire escape planters are impatiens and sweet alyssum and geraniums. Tiny blossoms stud Japanese knotweed plants in the alleys, and frilly flowers from mugwort growing out of the cracks of sidewalks beckon on burned-out, untended blocks. Even rubbled lots riddled with vials and syringes, Corona bottles and Red Bull cans, soon enough sprout fast-growing ailanthus trees, with blossoms the color of cream, in a kind of unattended urban renewal. Asters and goldenrod and early-flowering willows grow along the rivers, on the swamps, by the highways. Delicate blooms of Queen Anne’s lace shoot out of the ballast at railroad tracks. Rooftop gardens and decks produce blossoms from tomatoes and mint, squashes and oregano, melons and lavender, cabbages and rosemary, kale and peppers and chives, all of them offering their nectar to the discerning bee. The lawns of the great parks teem with the go-to flowers of weedy white clover, dandelions in the spring, and napweed in August. Park beds foster black-eyed Susans, Echinacea, yarrow, sunflowers, sedums, wisteria. For a bee, guided by eyes that respond to ultraviolet light, and a sense of smell as powerful as a hound dog’s, most every nook and cranny in the city blooms.
A bee needs to forage nectar all summer long, and, surprisingly, an urban landscape can offer bees a more diverse diet than a rural one. Contemporary rural landscapes are often dedicated to a single large-scale crop. If the only plant around is, say, soybeans, then bees can starve before the soybean plant opens its flowers. Commercial beekeepers whose main income generator is pollination regularly feed their bees high-fructose corn syrup as a dietary supplement in dry periods between work. Hobby beekeepers in isolated bits of California and Florida say that they have to supplement their bees’ diet too, in times during the summer when there’s no nectar or pollen for them to forage. This happens less in cities, because the flora are more diverse. Yet bees need volume, too, and city flowers may be hard to find in quantity enough to sate a hungry hive.