Honey and Venom Read online

  I received some notifications about bee boxes found in lower Manhattan and in Queens that were identifiable as those swept-away Grange boxes; the hives had broken apart and been carried off into the East River and spread over three boroughs of New York. But Chase didn’t let the incident get him down. As big a tragedy as Sandy was to those who lost everything—their livelihoods, their homes, or even their lives—Chase started an online campaign blaming the terrible storm for killing his bees. He quickly raised over $22,000 to replace what had been about $6,000 worth of bees and equipment that he had purchased from me that spring. He even issued a press release that hit all the right notes to open purse strings, resulting in a story that appeared in several publications.

  Edible Manhattan reported, “This is a tale of perseverance. One colony managed to escape their hive, and someone at Brooklyn Grange quickly built a new hive to protect the survivors. ‘We are not sure yet if there is a queen with them, but if there is, we’re going to do everything we can to ensure they survive the winter. Hurricane Hive, we got your back,’ wrote Chase Emmons, chief beekeeper.” I was impressed, in a stomach-churning sort of way, but mostly outraged that Chase was able to spin such willful negligence into gold with some media magic. But it made the gullible all the more willing to pony up dough, apparently. Most enraging to me, aside from the needless loss of honey bee life, was this bit in the Brooklyn Paper: “Emmons knew his hives were at risk before the storm struck, but relocating such a huge quantity of stinging insects is no small task. ‘There was little we could do without a Herculean effort,’ he said.”

  This opportunism aside, luckily, the beekeeping community overall did not suffer horrific losses, and of course our losses were nothing compared to the human toll from Superstorm Sandy.

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  Not all bee tales are so sour. There are successful rescue missions, too. Back in my Connecticut hometown, settled in 1649, the Norwalk Green Historic District is located more or less in the center of the city. There is the Norwalk Green, which includes a World War I memorial and a large white gazebo on a neatly manicured and lush lawn; the space has been used for public events for more than a century and a half. Facing the green are both St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and the First Congregational Church. Nearby is the Norwalk Historical Society and Mill Hill Historic Park, with a cemetery containing graves older than Norwalk itself.

  My old pal Anna Veccia worked part-time at the historical society and would sometimes take her lunch on the green, enjoying something she had brought from home or partaking from one of the few food trucks that parked alongside the area. These trucks sold inexpensive Mexican food and catered almost exclusively to the Central and South American day laborers toiling in and around the area doing landscaping work. On one particular day, sitting on a bench and slowly eating her sandwich, she happened to look up at the steeple of the First Congregational Church and notice something large affixed to a spot about one hundred feet up just under an awning.

  I wish I could write that a few bees flew down to her and that one settled on her knee, another on the bench beside her, and a third hovered to get her attention, whereupon they drew her line of vision upward and she spied a forlorn colony far above in the sky. Alas, it was less dramatic. Anna was simply enjoying a light snack in the slight chill of early autumn and noted what looked like a colony of honey bees that had set up shop in the great outdoors. She roused herself off the bench and walked across the street and up the church steps to take a closer gander at the sight. Upon this further inspection, she determined it was indeed a colony of honey bees, and it turned out to be the largest feral colony I had ever seen up close and in person at this latitude. It was three feet long and two feet wide, with huge, deep combs. It was enormous and beautiful and wholly out of place out there in the open on that 1848 tall, white southern New England steeple. Anna told me about it, and I planned to check it out but dragged my feet a bit.

  Until a couple of years ago I did not have a website, nor a business card, and I still do not have a business telephone number. So when people managed to get hold of me they either had tried very hard or were Norwalkers who knew someone in my family. Which means that even though I had not lived with my mother since I was a teenager, people will sometimes call her, after trying a few other of the Norwalk-listed Coté numbers, in an attempt to track me down.

  I later received an email from my mother saying she’d had a call from Norwalker Lyn Detroy, and it “had something to do with the Congregational Church bees.” Lyn reported that there was a concern that the bees making their home on the steeple might start dive-bombing parishioners and interfering with weddings. Realizing that this must be the colony that Anna had spotted, and always happy to do something new and exciting in the bee realm, my father and I visited some of his former colleagues at the Norwalk Fire Department. We asked to borrow a fire truck with an aerial ladder to get up to the colony. As my father had been a well-respected Norwalk fire lieutenant for decades, the loan was easily arranged.

  The first day that we could get to the church just happened to be the same day that a one o’clock wedding was being held there, so we knew we had to work quickly and carefully. The morning of the rescue, I woke up in Manhattan early, drove an hour up to Norwalk, and met my father, Anna, and a bunch of family members who would act as witnesses and cheerleaders near the green just as the sun was about to rise. Our plan was to grab as many of the bees as possible before the foragers started off for their workday.

  Unlike a routine inspection performed when half of the colony is out foraging, this job was a little rough in that the whole colony was home, just as we had hoped they would be. While it was good that we could theoretically get all the bees, it was difficult in that we had to deal with tens of thousands of foragers, who jealously defended their home as soon as we started dismantling it. Our approach was to cut the comb sections off the steeple, pass them into waiting containers, and repeat until there was no more hive on the church. This worked well but for the fact that the colony was much larger than anticipated. In fact, it had looked as small from the ground as our friends and family now looked from up high, so we soon ran out of room in our containers.

  We didn’t want to descend back to earth to get more because we didn’t have room in our small working area, nor did we wish to lower the thirty-five thousand recently evicted bees and leave them down among Norwalk’s bravest and our kin. The comb, which was heavily laden with honey and brood, is made of thin beeswax, so it was not strong to begin with. Even though the hexagon is the strongest shape found in nature, when the comb is turned on its side and dislodged from its original home, it becomes very weak. We tried to avoid breaking any, but it was a big job made more difficult by a myriad of stings—in spite of our full beekeeping gear and thick calfskin gloves—and the dizzying heights.

  We ended up making a sticky, messy job of it, but we got it all. The only thing that remained was a dark stain on the underside of the steeple where the honeycomb was once firmly attached, and a few years later that was touched up with white paint. In their own literal way and though I did not realize it at the time, these bees brought me closer to G-d than I had been in many years, or ever expected to be. Later, after transferring it all into a traditional beehive, we relocated the comb and colony to an inner-city community garden in Bedford-Stuyvesant as part of a local Bees Without Borders project.

  The wedding went off without a hitch, with no one getting a bee in their bonnet.

  Afterward, my father and I cleaned up, washed off, and got on a plane for China.

  I had been invited by the Global Center for Hospitality Management, which is part of the New York Institute of Technology, to give a talk on urban beekeeping in Hangzhou, China, about forty-five minutes southeast of Shanghai via the fastest possible train, as part of the First International Forum on Sustainable Development of Hospitality, Education, and Industry. It was a huge a
nd exciting conference, and I fully expected it to live up to its very long title.

  A year earlier, I had been in the office of Dr. Robert Koenig, the assistant dean of hospitality studies at NYIT, to talk about placing beehives on the roof of the school. I immediately found him affable, polite, and brimming with boundless energy and enthusiasm. His office was filled with awards, certificates, photographs, and newspaper articles from his decades in the hospitality business, and a huge wine collection.

  As we talked about the possibility of placing beehives on the roof, I consulted with a friend I had brought along with me, Dr. Fumio Sakamoto (坂本 文夫). A fellow beekeeper and professor from Kyoto Gakuen University, Dr. Sakamoto was visiting from Japan for a few days and staying at the New York Hilton Midtown, where I maintained an apiary of six beehives. We had spent the day hopping from one rooftop apiary to the next as I returned the favor and courtesy he had extended to me earlier in the year, when my father and I had tagged along with him visiting rooftop apiaries in Kyoto and its outskirts. He had also taken me to one of the three shops in Kyoto that specialize in selling pure honey. Pure, unadulterated honey is a rarity in Japan, even more so than in the United States. More than 94 percent of the honey sold in that country is from foreign sources, usually China, and, as earlier mentioned, that so-called honey is often not actual honey but rather genuine honey heavily diluted with simple syrup. Dreadful stuff.

  Dr. Sakamoto is a foremost authority on honey bees, and I was familiar with his work prior to being lucky enough to meet him. He escorted my father and me to his honey bee laboratory at the university, to his office (which looked like that of a mad scientist with a bee fixation, which is pretty much what it was), and not only to his own apiaries but to those of his friends. One beekeeper, a fellow about fifty years old, was using a hive tool that was different from any I had ever seen before. I openly admired it, and before I could stop him, the man insisted that I accept it as a gift. I insisted that he keep it. He was not going to back down, so in the end we compromised; we would trade hive tools, mine for his. Then he told me that his father, who has since passed on, had given him the unusually shaped tool. So we shared a reflective moment in the meadow in which we were standing, in the tall grass punctuated by yellow flowers, and spoke gently about all that our fathers had done for us in beekeeping and in our lives.

  Then my father, who had been playfully hiding in the waist-high weeds and flowers, stood up to reveal his presence. He pantomimed growing up out of the earth as a beautiful flower himself, extending his arms as if he were blossoming. The man and I laughed at him. We had been speaking in Japanese so there was no way that Norm could have understood the conversation, even if he could have heard it—which he couldn’t have, given that he is largely deaf from too many years of fire truck alarms and sirens. But his timing, as always, was impeccable.

  Back at NYIT, Dr. Koenig explained that he wanted his students to do something hands-on that was outside of the usual curriculum, and he and Dr. Sakamoto and I talked about urban beekeeping as a possibility. During the course of the conversation, Robert, as he insisted on being called, asked if I would be willing to talk about urban beekeeping and rooftop farming at a conference being planned for the following October in Hangzhou, China. Marco Polo had called Hangzhou the City of Heaven; of course I accepted. And, naturally, I asked if I could bring an assistant. This is how my father and I ended up flying to Hong Kong one late October morning and, after spending a day in Kowloon and on Hong Kong Island, catching a connection to Hangzhou.

  In Hong Kong I had hoped to meet up again with urban beekeeper Michael Leung. We had met in New York City several years prior when the NYCBA hosted him as a speaker. Our schedules did not quite mesh, but we did find time for a phone conversation about beekeeping practices in mainland China and our mutual passion for maintaining beehives. It’s nice to know that in nearly any major city in the world, I have a counterpart with whom I can compare notes about beekeeping—Marie Laure Legroux in Paris; Dale Gibson in London; Torbjørn Andersen in Reykjavik; Nils Simon in Berlin; Kaethe Burt-O’Dea in Dublin, Kazuo Takayasu in Tokyo, and Isamu Nishimura in Kyoto. Good beeks are all over.

  I knew very little about China and even less about beekeeping in China. What little I knew included that in 2014, a fellow named Ruan Liangming had sixty caged queen bees strapped to his body, resulting in about 140 lbs. of honey bees landing on him, awarding him the Guinness World Record for the “heaviest mantle of bees” ever worn. And that in 2009 a couple of beekeepers, Li Wenhua and Yan Hongxia, decided to be likewise covered in honey bees while taking their marriage vows. In other words, at least I knew that beekeepers in China were likely to be as obsessed with bees and beekeeping as most any other apiarists.

  More seriously, in China, with an incredibly large population to feed, cities increasing in size, and food becoming more scarce with land disappearing into urban sprawl, beekeeping is becoming more and more of a challenge. Heavy pesticide use continues to present a tremendous challenge for the little honey bee, which doesn’t fare well in the hostile environment of chemicals. Colonies wither and die. With honey bees on the decline, it’s imperative to find an alternative for the pollination services that the honey bee would normally provide. And the Chinese have found one: hand pollination.

  In Hanyuan County, for example, the self-described “World’s Pear Capital,” unchecked pesticide usage has all but eliminated honey bees. Pear tree flowers, which are not especially attractive to bees in the best of times, are consequently pollinated by hand by men and women who climb ladders, scale trees, and transfer pollen, which they carry in little jars, to the stamens of the flowers via long sticks with feathers attached to the end. They dip the feathers into the jar of pollen, taken from male blossoms, and they dust pollen into the bud to stimulate the growth of the fruit in the female flowers. In the absence of insect pollination and without human-assisted pollination, the trees would not bear fruit.

  The problem of Apis species decline is not unique to China, though in some places there, it is extreme. Bee diversity has been a fact of life for millions of years on planet Earth, but it’s diminishing all over the world at an alarming rate. This, of course, includes thousands of native bees in addition to the honey bee that we know and love. The Macropis cuckoo bee, best known as the bee home invader that will take over another bee’s nest and lay her eggs in it, is at the top of the endangered list in North America. The Great Plains are now nearly void of the oversized sunflower leafcutter bee; the three-lobe snouted sweet potato bee from the East of North America is also dying out. Sadly, there are thousands more examples; perhaps as many as one in four types of Apis species are under threat of extinction.

  Since bees may be considered the canary in the coal mine of our ecosystem, this does not bode well. It is widely reported that Albert Einstein said, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live,” but he didn’t really say it. It was said by Maurice Maeterlinck in 1901, and it’s not true. Still, it is true that honey bees contribute pollinating services to food for billions of people, and without them, we would have a much blander diet. Unless, that is, we all start stapling chicken feathers onto the ends of long sticks and hand-pollinating our favorite fruits and vegetables. So while the honey bee itself may not be in as much danger as many people believe, it is true that in general terms, bees of all stripes are under varying levels of threat from habitat loss, pesticide mismanagement, and climate change, and the honey bee specifically is greatly harmed by these issues. The diminishing population of Apis species is a complex issue, but one chief takeaway is that the lack of care for the ecosystem as a whole has devastating consequences for our pollinators, and this goes beyond bees and into butterflies, birds, and other creatures. But I digress.

  Robert had arranged for a car to take my father and me to the hotel when we arrived in Hangzhou. We had imagined we would be treated well, bu
t we had no idea what a luxury event awaited us. The conference was massive, with several hundred attendees from all over the world. At least two dozen delegates came from New York, and there were others from many other locations. The hotel room my father and I shared (New England beekeepers, we are pragmatic even when someone else is footing the bill) was beautiful and afforded us views of the city that might have been even more spectacular if not for the poor air quality. Everywhere one looked there was construction. The food was spectacular, though unfamiliar. We are adventurous sorts—my father still remembers eating mopane worms, which are actually large caterpillars, in Zimbabwe. I’ve had my fair share of unusual food and drink in my travels around the world. But nothing could prepare us for the delicacies of Hangzhou cuisine. Duck tongue. Or, the entire duck head. Still-squirming live seafood. Spicy river snails. Pickled chicken feet. And—though I don’t dine on swine—we were offered pig ears and a great deal of pork options. Each item I tried proved more delectable than the last. It was hard to settle on a favorite.

  At the conference, many speakers ran over their time limit and my original half-hour presentation was reduced to a mere seven minutes. I gave a one-sentence introduction in Cantonese that garnered rousing applause—no doubt mere politeness. Then I switched to English at double the normal speed, flipping through my slides perhaps too quickly to be fully or even partially absorbed. The interpreter had no chance to keep up, I fear. Thank goodness for the photos and videos of the bees, which needed no words and carried my message of the beauty of the small creatures, even in—or especially in—an urban environment. So in seven minutes I earned our keep for the trip.

  The conference was energizing on many levels, and I met several interesting and accomplished people, but for my father and me, the real fun began at its conclusion. My fervor is perpetually with the bees, and so to that end, I had my good friend Mio, who had spent a year in China, help me find beekeepers in and around Hangzhou. As fate would have it, Hannah Sng Baek, my trusty worker from the farmers’ market, was studying in Korea for a year, and was able to make the trip down to meet us. So we three beekeepers met in the lobby of our hotel the day after the conference, were greeted by our guide, LingLing, and headed off to get to know some of the four-winged, six-legged flying Chinese.