Eat the City(8)
His second-favorite hives are on top of a luxury apartment building at Second Avenue and Fourteenth Street, where the bees zoom down toward bodegas and street traffic. Maybe they head east to the clover flowers of Tompkins Square Park, where the blossoms are muddled by the sleeping bodies of spiky-haired kids. Or perhaps they fly south to the flowers of Chinatown’s window gardens, steeped in the scent of the fish market. This is the strange fact of urban beekeeping: You don’t know exactly where your honey comes from. Single-varietal honey doesn’t exist in the city because there are no enormous fields of heather or giant orange groves that would satisfy the hunger of a whole hive.
One of Andrew’s assistants today is Kimberly White, a Baruch College student with a radiant face and gold-painted, stubby fingernails. She’s originally from Saint Vincent and met Andrew one day at the Rockefeller Center farmers’ market after her math class. From behind his jars and piles of sample spoons in the stand, Andrew said, “Try some honey?” “I tried it and I loved it,” says Kimberly. “I had two more spoonfuls.” As is his wont, Andrew urged her to buy.
“I can’t buy the honey,” she said.
“Don’t you have a job?” Andrew asked.
Soon Kimberly found herself working for Andrew, selling honey from that very stand. She’s interested in learning more about bees, she says, as a first step in her real mission: to figure out how to repair the environment. “I’m interning at Sustainable Flatbush,” she says. “I’m supposed to be building solar panels.”
Andrew’s other assistant, Cecilia Lee, an NYU student from Argentina, has been excused from active duty because of her inappropriate attire. She ignored Andrew’s emailed instructions to wear a long-sleeved shirt and full-length pants, and showed up for honey harvesting wearing a wild turkey feather in her long hair, a sleeveless shirt, and a short tulle skirt, exposing arms and legs most stingable. She says she wants to someday grow all her own food and live off the grid. Today, however, she just goes to fetch extra garbage bags. Then she sits on a step, holding a ball of beeswax, sucking on the ends of it, rolling it in her palm, releasing its perfume into the hot air.
Residents of this building have apparently complained of finding twenty-one dead bees on the front steps. “First of all, what kind of an * stands there and counts them?” Andrew had asked as he walked up the steps. And then he looked down. Disturbingly, there were indeed many tiny bodies of expired bees. He frowned. “Secondly, they shouldn’t be there.”
Once on the roof, Andrew has two tasks to execute quickly: First, to figure out why so many bees are littering the steps and irritating the neighbors with their corpses. Then, to rob them of their honey.
“It’s a strong queen,” Andrew says now, admiring the hive. “Good proximity to the nectar source.” He pulls up frame after frame bursting with honey. In some frames, the honey is dark, in some it’s light, depending on what combination of flowers the bees visited. Not every frame is perfect. One is laced with white boils of brood, or bee eggs. Wherever the queen goes, she lays, so you have to keep her away from the honey. Andrew must have been late this year installing his queen excluder—a metal screen with openings large enough for worker bees to pass through but too small for the queen. “This guy is not well,” Andrew says, pointing to a small round ball of a bee hobbling along as though without wings or legs. “The way he’s walking—” It’s not good, but Andrew sees no other telltale signs of mites or illness. After an inconclusive examination of two hives, he shifts his attention to the honey.
If the harvest is good, Andrew might find the comb on every frame covered in neat caps of wax, a full forty pounds in every box of maybe six hives in a row, totaling 240 pounds of honey in one trip. “Gorgeous!” he will say, grinning at the brilliance of his bees and all but doing a tap dance. “The babies are going to eat tonight! I can buy the kids shoes!” At a troubled hive, he might pull out only ten pounds of honey, and he’ll be upset enough to slam the frames back into place and turn away. “But you’re training people,” someone will say encouragingly, noting his good work with apprentices. “I’ll just tell the bank that,” Andrew will reply darkly. Forty pounds of city-made honey, a respectable biannual harvest from one hive, is worth $1,600 at market. Andrew, who is single and has no kids, does have mortgages to pay—on his studio apartment in the Lower East Side and also on two properties in Connecticut—and he toys with the idea of buying a building in Brooklyn to fix up. Andrew needs honey.
Here on the roof on Second Avenue, the harvest is neither thrilling nor deplorable. Only two hives have honey, but they hold a good forty pounds per. Andrew tries to pull the full frames of honey out quickly, but he’s spent too much time with his inspections and now the bees know what’s coming. “The bees are a lot angrier now,” says Andrew. “It’s usually better as a stealth mission than a snatch-and-grab mission.”
Their noise has intensified, thousands of tiny bodies helicoptering through space, wings flapping as though propelled by engines and, at close range, just as loud. I try to track one single bee: Is she spinning, dancing, darting? But they all move too fast, too closely together to differentiate. Scientifically, too, they are not individuals, I read later. Biologists call a colony of bees a superorganism—an organism consisting of many organisms, in which the division of labor is highly specialized and individuals may not survive by themselves. The noise they make all together sounds like a low-temperature sizzle.