Eat the City(9)
“I’m already spilling honey all over, so they know I’m robbing them,” says Andrew. The bees have embedded themselves in the honey, nosing into it, swarming over it. It’s difficult to pry out any particular one without injuring her. And they’re also crashing into all of us.
“They’re going to get you!” Andrew yells to Kimberly, urging her to move. “They’re going to sting you right through your clothes!” As the bees get more agitated, they crawl up Ceci’s skirt and attach to each other in a chain between two layers of filmy tulle. In a jerky ballet, she wiggles and waves her skirt to get them out, still holding a ball of their beeswax in one hand.
After advance and retreat for more than an hour, the hives on this roof are finally emptied of honey. Andrew and the girls quickly wrap the supers full of honey frames in garbage bags. They pack all the equipment away, drop the wax, lid the hives, kill the smoke. Andrew and Kimberly each heave to their shoulders a sticky, plastic-wrapped forty-pound super, and we all clomp downstairs. “Shhh!” Andrew says. He doesn’t want to annoy the neighbors and lose roof access.
Back on the street, the truck is still buzzing from the last stop, and a man slows and stares in disgust. “Are those bees?” he asks. Andrew jumps into the driver’s seat to make a break for it before the man has time to call the city’s 311 hotline and complain. Though keeping bees is legal, there’s no need to attract official interest by driving through the city tailed by thousands of them.
With three hive stops, carrying hive tools and supers up and down stairs and fighting angry bees for their honey wealth in the blazing heat, the day has been exhausting, stressful, and only moderately productive. “You can see why I’m irritated when people come to the stand at the market and complain about the price of honey,” Andrew says.
As he drives home, Andrew outlines his biography. He’s a kind of renaissance man, who got the idea of keeping city hives while working as an assistant professor of English at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He speaks a half dozen languages, studied Japanese lit, got a Fulbright in Moldova, and worked as a writer in India—but came back to his hometown of Norwalk when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. There, he started Silvermine Apiary, which sells wholesale honey to supermarkets. He also began a PhD at Yale in Middle East studies, and raised funds for the nonprofit Bees Without Borders he and his father launched to teach beekeeping in impoverished countries. Norm, a retired fire lieutenant, runs his own beekeeping business, Norm’s Other Honey. Andrew’s older brother, a police officer, also keeps a handful of hives. Andrew eventually abandoned his PhD—“I was more interested in spending time with my father and the bees.” Andrew is dating a woman he met while selling honey at the market.
Aristotle and Virgil commented on honeybees, notes Andrew as he drives. As a gift between two betrothed, honey has been a symbol of love. But Andrew is more interested in the use of bees in war. In ancient Iraq, he says, fighters would catapult a hive at their enemies, “so the hive would burst, and you’d have a lot of unhappy people.” Consequently, perhaps, there’s a hadith, or saying of the Prophet Muhammad: Do not scatter bees in wartime. Medieval Europeans would pitch an angry hive off the castle ramparts into the thick of advancing troops. More recently, during the Vietnam War, guerrillas booby-trapped the roads so passing American soldiers would disturb a beehive and unleash a buzzing, stinging fury. “Clever,” Andrew says.
He talks about his own confrontations with clouds of buzzing bees on the occasions when he’s been called to a swarm. During a swarm, half the bees in a healthy hive fortify themselves with honey and fly off in a group with the queen in search of a new home. It is a perfectly normal method of hive reproduction, and not particularly dangerous—swarming bees are actually at their most docile, as they’re just looking for a safe place to stay and don’t yet have a nest to protect.
The trouble is that while swarming bees wait for their scouts to come back and reach consensus on the most advantageous bit of real estate, they will hover in a cluster for hours or even days. They want ideally to be in a tree branch about thirty feet high—but in a city, they will settle for anything roughly that height. Tens of thousands of bees might attach to a traffic light and one another, creating a dangling accretion of insects. Once Andrew flagged down a Heineken truck and paid the driver fifty dollars to let him clamber onto the truck’s roof to reach bees. Store owners and street-corner observers emerged to offer the kind of advice they would give to someone parallel parking. “You gotta get higher!” “You gotta grab the bees with a plastic bag!”
Hot and tired, Andrew quotes from honey-related texts while navigating traffic. The bees have abandoned the back of the truck, so it is no longer identifiable as a honeymobile. The girls are quiet. The sheen of the day has worn off, but Andrew’s still going.
“Who says the only reason for bees to exist is for me to eat honey?” Andrew asks. “Winnie-the-Pooh,” he answers himself, “the bear has no pants, I’m telling you. ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I’?—The Tempest.”
He could happily continue, but at Tenth Street, a woman wanders into the crosswalk in front of the truck.
“Hey, sweetheart, I have a green light and you have a red light—are you f*cking color blind?” Andrew yells out the window.
“Yes, I am!” the woman calls back.