Eat the City(7)

In the 1980s and early 1990s, as more people in New York City took up gardening in abandoned, burned, and industrial neighborhoods, some watched their flourishing flowers shrivel and die. They worried their plants were not being pollinated. So they fertilized their squashes and cucumbers by hand, snipping off all of the flower but the pollen tube on the male plant and nuzzling it against the newly open female. Roger Repohl, a community gardener who lives in the Morrisania section of the South Bronx, recalls that his own plants weren’t doing as well as he wished. “The horticulturists came by and said, ‘That’s because the South Bronx is so devastated at this time, there’s not enough pollinators,’ ” said Roger, who soon took up beekeeping. Across the city, various community gardens quietly installed illicit beehives behind a wall or in a bush, and a few knowledgeable people trained others in the care and maintenance of honeybees.

John Ascher, a bee expert at the American Museum of Natural History, says that fear of insufficient pollinators may have been unfounded. Apis mellifera, the honeybee, buzzes around alongside more than 240 kinds of wild bees recorded in New York City. The variety is enormous and includes tiny, bronze-colored sweat bees, longhorned bees, masked bees, carpenter bees, and bees that lay eggs in other bees’ well-kept nests to consume their pollen and nectar. Any given community garden in New York is likely to foster as many as several dozen bee species, according to recent research. Though there might be a bad year or two for bees—too hot, too cold, too much rain—it’s unlikely that any area of the city would go without pollination for long.

“We look at the city and think of it as being inhospitable to wildlife,” said Kevin Matteson, an urban ecologist who has studied bees in New York City. “But when you look at it and think of what bees see and what they need—it is absolutely hospitable to wildlife.”

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“POP the smoker!” yells Andrew Coté to his disciples on a rooftop filled with wood planter boxes of basil, peppers, cardoons, chrysanthemums, and cleomes, and several white, gray, red, and yellow hives. The young beekeepers-in-training scramble for matches to burn burlap to produce smoke that causes bees to react as though under attack, and to fortify themselves by consuming stores of honey, rather than stinging interlopers. The apprentices work like surgical assistants, proffering each instrument as Andrew requests it. “Hive tool!” he says, and an arm stretches forth with the tool. “Paper towel!” he says, and the towel is there. Andrew hunkers down in front of what look like filing cabinets of bees, which is essentially what the hives are. They consist of stacked wooden boxes: a brood box at the base, where the queen lays her eggs, and honey boxes, or supers, above, which the workers pack with honeycomb. The supers are filled with frames, like hanging file folders, which themselves are made up of flat waxen sheets double embossed with hexagonal patterns on both sides, which the bees build up with their own wax and fill with honey. It’s easy to lift out a full frame of honey and exchange it for an empty one for the bees to work next. It happens a few times a summer, so maybe the bees know what to expect. The longer you spend working in their hive, the angrier they get.

There are routine things to do to keep urban bees happy. You have to put out trays of water so the bees won’t gather on windowsills to slurp the dripping beads of liquid condensation from air conditioners or crowd a public pool deck to suck from chlorinated puddles. A tar roof can get very hot and burn bees’ legs, so it’s important to keep it wet, or covered with a sheet, when opening up a rooftop hive. Working in tight, crowded spaces demands a certain ingenuity. Recently Andrew had to lower a 240-pound hive by rope down the rusty old fire escape of a four-story tenement after the building was sold and the new owner wanted no part of rooftop beekeeping.

Andrew pries the lid off of one box to reveal the bee society within. Thousands of little black and yellow insects crawl on top of one another to flee deeper into the hive, away from the smoke. Some of the bees glisten as though wet with nectar, and when they fly into my hair I feel them like drops of rain. There’s an unsteady, dizzying buzz as they move in and out of my auditory range. A healthy hive at its peak in midsummer can sustain 40,000 to 80,000 bees with many different vocations. The queen lays up to two thousand eggs a day, creating all the new bees the hive needs, Andrew tells me. Drones are the only males in the hive, and their sole function is to mate with the queen. Their sisters are the worker bees, who serve as foragers for water, nectar, and pollen, and also act as guards and masons and nurses and undertakers and cooks. A forager flies up to two miles to extract nectar and pollen from flowers for food. Back at the hive, she passes it to the mouths of her fellow workers, who process it, removing most of the water, transforming sucrose into glucose and fructose and injecting a preservative enzyme. The bees deposit this new substance in a hexagonal cell of the honeycomb. When the cell is full, they cap it with whitish wax, protecting dark honey beneath—the bees’ version of canning for the winter, since honey is bee food when no flower blooms.

Thrifty bees often produce more honey than they need to survive, and a good beekeeper can encourage them to overproduce very profitably. “Like human beings, they work themselves literally to death to gather wealth they have no need for,” noted a Brooklyn Heights beekeeper of the 1960s, who worked at a Wall Street firm.

Andrew judges his hives not only by their productivity but also by their prettiness. Of his many hives in three boroughs, Andrew’s favorites are located beside the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan on the roof of the Bridge Cafe, the oldest wood-frame building in the city and the longest constantly running tavern (since 1794). The top stories once served as a whorehouse, but are now full of graffiti and old furniture. In the world of hive real estate, the roof is in a fabulous location, with iconic views. “Under the Brooklyn Bridge! In the shadow of the Municipal Building!” Andrew will gloat, as he reaches bare-handed into one of the six hives, bees stinging up and down his arms. “Ouch!” he says, grimacing, but not slowing down.