by Andrew Coté
Copyright © 2020 by Andrew Coté
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9781524799045
Ebook ISBN 9781524799052
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook
Cover design and illustration: Natalya Balnova
ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r2
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.
—JOHN MUIR (1838–1914)
PROLOGUE
I bleed honey. It runs deep in my veins.
I am a fourth-generation beekeeper, intimately familiar with the world of honey bees and the aberrations of those who maintain them.
Early on, I honed my craft as a beekeeper on the array of hives that surrounded my boyhood home in Fairfield County, Connecticut. But today, aside from my apiaries in the suburbs and countryside surrounding Gotham, my turf includes skyscrapers, community gardens, ancient cemeteries, international territory, and other hidden pockets of New York City. My apiaries top, or have topped, some of New York’s most iconic buildings and locales, from the Museum of Modern Art to the Waldorf Astoria. My bees buzz above the lawn of the United Nations and the cemeteries of Green-Wood in Brooklyn, Woodlawn in the Bronx, and St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral down on Little Italy’s Mulberry Street. They preside atop Industry City in Sunset Park and flitter over a ballet school near the Flatiron. They hover and dart above churches and synagogues, secondary schools and restaurants. The apiary I installed and tend above the seventy-second floor of a hotel near Central Park is the highest in the world, though admittedly not the most productive. While it is certainly a thrill for me to work with these industrious, extra-high-flying honey bees* at such lofty altitudes, I love working with those at ground level just as much—although I do envy the spectacular views of the city dwellers. All of these bees serve restaurants, grocery stores, my own honey stand, and, of course, first and foremost, themselves.
Beekeeping—and for beeks like me, urban beekeeping—is a passion for those who practice it. Worldwide, more and more people are drawn to this bewitching and satisfyingly messy work for environmental and conservation reasons, for the joy of producing something on their own, and because honey is, well, delicious.
One thing I love about beekeeping is how it brings people together in combinations one could not otherwise imagine. Because of it, I’ve cultivated the most unexpected acquaintances and friendships both close to home and abroad. I’ve worked with Parisian beekeeper Marie Laure Legroux on hives that have been on the grounds of the Luxembourg Gardens since 1856 (though Marie has not been there quite so long), and others with Nicolas Geant atop the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées and Notre-Dame (the three atop Notre-Dame, it should be noted, survived the tragic fire that gutted the building in 2019). I’ve harvested from log hives in rural Samburuland in Kenya, helped prepare bees for overwintering in small Moldovan villages, relocated apiaries in immediate post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and helped Fijian beekeepers increase their profitability through targeted marketing of honey to honeymooners. Friendships were often forged along with those endeavors, many of which continue to this day.
Thoreau says that keeping bees is like directing sunbeams. Cupid supposedly dipped his arrows in honey before he set them flying. My favorite may be the words of Victor Hugo, who wrote “Life is the flower for which love is the honey.” I think the Frenchman was onto something there. I adore these magical little creatures—from my rusticating hives in the countryside to their cosmopolitan cousins atop Manhattan high-rises. I love my bees and I love how I came to be a beekeeper.
I learned beekeeping from my father, Norm, who is distinctly humble and soft-spoken. A wiry fellow who as of this writing is in the latter portion of his eighth decade, he was a navy man poised on a ship off the coast of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis. After his days on the water dried up, he turned to fire, serving for more than three decades as a lieutenant in the Norwalk fire department. In the days following the attacks of 9/11, he was part of a dogged rescue and recovery team digging fruitlessly in the pile of rubble that was once the World Trade Center. But like many men of action, Norm’s manner is calm, patient, and distinctive.
His mother, Aldea, grew up on a farm with honey bees in Quebec, where she, along with her siblings and father, managed colonies of the nectar-gathering empresses of the sky. When she moved to the United States, she left the bees and the farm behind, giving rise to a brief period of dormancy for beekeeping in our lineage until Norm picked up the baton—or the bee smoker and hive tool. Whatever else we are, both my brother, Mike, and I are also now beekeepers, as are my brother’s children; I hope mine will be as well. Through our charity, a 501(c)(3), Bees Without Borders, my father and I have traveled the world as a team carrying on the family tradition, teaching, listening, and working with bees while navigating our own modest bee business at home. And beekeeping for the beekeeper is a lot like it is for the honey bees themselves, or at least can be. Overlapping generations working together. Cooperative brood care. Division of labor. Mutual love of honey. We all have a lot in common.
In New York City, a place where passion and competition abound, there were only a couple of dozen beehives registered when beekeeping became legal in 2010 (although many more went unregistered). About a decade later, there are hundreds of registered beehives in the city with an estimated hundreds more unregistered. While most, myself included, would say that more beehives is a good thing, the zeal for beekeeping has led to a situation that any New Yorker, bee enthusiast or not, will find unsurprising: The business of beekeeping can be cutthroat. Many would correctly describe the act of beekeeping itself as humbling, serene, instructive, and even meditative. But it can also be rife with rivalries and animosity, turf wars and hostile takeovers. Sheepishly, I confess to once—but happily no longer—being among the most guilty of those megalomaniacs; there’s only so much real estate for the bees, and there’s a finite supply of nectar where I practice the ancient art. At long last the bees have taught me humility. Still, from time to time there are conflicts. The honey of a crowded hive is defended by a thousand stings. Or, at least, so say the Olney Hymns.
For all the competition, occasional bouts of unpleasantness, and stings—from bees and humans alike—there are many things I very much enjoy about being part of an urban beekeeping community. Living in Manhattan, I’ve had occasional brushes with celebrities, which are nearly always exciting and good fodder for stories—like the time I met and had a friendly chat with Denzel Washington, or when Natalie Portman walked off smiling, clutching a jar of my whipped honey. Aziz Ansari, the world-famous comedian, saw no shame in pragmatically bargaining five dollars off his purchase, and it was exciting when Uma Thurman, herself a beekeeper at the time, bought one of our hon
eycombs.
Setting up shop and hawking honey at the Union Square Greenmarket in lower Manhattan has introduced me to many intriguing people, including famous chefs, actors, and artists. Padma Lakshmi regularly comes by, and we talk about bees and life. Martha Stewart, whose bees my father tended for twenty years, comes by on occasion. Alec Baldwin and I have discussed the trials and tribulations of being a father later in life. David Schwimmer and I laughed about our uncanny resemblance when we were in our twenties, “which I hope was a compliment to us both,” he said, certainly joking, since neither of us were pinups.
Hugh Jackman and I conversed for ten minutes without my knowing who he was (nor, to be fair, he I); he was in the company of celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and, the market being a foodie mecca, I thought that all of the hangers-on and cameras were there for Chef Jean-Georges. Hugh and I talked about distinct Australian honey varieties, like Leatherwood from Tasmania, and how on Hog Bay, Kangaroo Island, the Ligurian Bee Sanctuary continues to breed the last remaining pure Ligurian honey bee stock in the world. As he departed, having purchased a bottle of buckwheat honey, I asked him what he did for a living. “I do some acting, singing….I’m doing something on Broadway now,” he replied, very matter-of-factly and without a trace of amusement at my ignorance of his identity. “Excellent! Good luck with that!” I told him sincerely. When they were able to speak again, the two women who work with me informed me that I had been speaking with a megastar best known at the time for portraying Wolverine in the X-Men series.
On a more long-lasting level, thanks to beekeeping, I have made friends whom I cannot imagine otherwise ever getting to know. Most are people I had little else in common with—or so I thought—before the bees united us. Like Robert Deschak, a former marine captain with a degree in medieval literature, who once broke his collarbone while attempting to retrieve a swarm from a tree in front of the rectory of Saint Mary’s Church on Grand Street; BJ Fredricks, a classical music singer, motorcycle rider, and chicken keeper, who’s heavily involved in apitherapy and sustainability; and Valentina Ramirez, a Chilean-born woman who grew up in Tokyo and is currently finishing her doctorate, who astutely describes herself “like a T-Rex, with a big butt and short arms.” Instagram influencer and native Manhattanite Eva Chen discovered my matcha-infused honey and told her followers about it, and now I have daily visitors thanks all to her. One of them, Michele Seelinger, a Jersey City–based Montessori teacher who loves honey bees and turtles, summed it up well: “[Beekeepers are] some of the kindest, friendliest NYC weirdos you’ll ever meet!”
I have wanted to write this for a long time, but I had trouble figuring out how to make the time to sit and write a book on the divine flying creatures Khalil Gibran called “the messengers of love.” Then it hit me like a bus. Rather, I was hit by a bus. I was delivering packages of honey bees to Brooklynites when, just entering Bed-Stuy at about midnight one rainy April evening, I was broadsided by an MTA bus. I was whisked off in an ambulance to a seedy south Brooklyn hospital in the middle of the night, covered in broken glass and my own blood. During my recuperation, the beginnings of this book took shape.
There is so much to tell! Most people know that, through their own alchemy, honey bees turn nectar into honey. But fewer know that they have five eyes, four wings, sort-of two stomachs, one for honey and one for digestion—though the honey stomach is not a digestive stomach, even though the name calls it a stomach. It is more like the crop of a chicken—and that their bodies are completely covered in hair, even their eyes and tongue. They have no ears but they feel vibrations with their feet and antennae. They can actually feel and respond to gravity. The drones (males) have no fathers but have grandfathers. Honey bees and dinosaurs coexisted, and the former have been around since the Cretaceous period. Honey bees have traveled aboard the space shuttle. They can be trained to detect bombs or cancer. They pollinate crops and help produce food for the planet’s animals, including humans. They live atop the Paris opera house and on the roofs of buildings in Vilnius, Melbourne, and Kyoto. Honey bees have been part of the landscape in Iceland since the late 1980s. They have been used as weapons of war and a means to heal. I am all for the latter.
It has been a long haul, but despite the hard work involved, like working with bees, the effort of writing this book has made me happy, despite coming into contact with the occasional sting. In part for that reason, some names have been changed in this book. Ray Bradbury wrote that the bees’ feet are dusted with the spices from a million flowers. If you’ve read this far I’ll hope that you have chosen to enter the world of beekeeping through the portal of these pages. I hope that some of that happiness that the bees bring, like the precious powdered pollen being transferred by her magical and magnificent self from its origin of the flower to its new home in the hive, will settle on you.
* In his 1956 Anatomy of the Honey Bee, Robert Snodgrass writes in part: “We have in entomology a rule for insect common names that can be followed. It says: If the insect is what the name implies, write the two words separately; otherwise run them together.” Thus we have such names as house fly, blow fly, and robber fly contrasted with dragonfly, caddicefly, and butterfly, because the latter are not flies, just as an aphislion is not a lion and a silverfish is not a fish. The honey bee is an insect and is preeminently a bee; “honeybee” is equivalent to “Johnsmith.” Plus, who wants to argue with a guy named Snodgrass?
JANUARY
Such bees! Bilbo had never seen anything like them. “If one were to sting me,” he thought, “I should swell up as big again as I am!”
—J.R.R. TOLKIEN, The Hobbit
Burnt goat meat on a stick. I ate it to help avoid getting stung by bees. But, as I often do, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Winter is the quiet season in beekeeping, which means that January is a slow month for a beekeeper in the northeastern United States. The bees themselves do not hibernate;*1 but they are dormant. They huddle around the queen to keep her warm and to help her (and themselves) survive the frigid temperatures outside the hive in much the same manner as we gather indoors with family and friends around a crackling fireplace. Their cluster tightens and loosens in accordance with the outside temperature.
But even during the freezing months there may be the odd warm day, and that’s when I make my rounds to check on as many of my beehives as I can manage. I may brush the snow from the front of the hives and hold a stethoscope up to the side of the wooden hive boxes to listen for the bees’ hum within. I might employ a heat-seeking device to determine whether a colony is surviving and maintaining adequate temperatures in their cluster. Seeing a few dead bees in front of the hive is an encouraging sign—it means that live bees within, acting as undertakers, were recently active enough to toss out their sisters’ little corpses. It’s not as if I could do much of anything for my bees if they were faring poorly—if they’ve expired over the winter, they’re gone. It is perfectly natural for the oldest bees to die in a colony on a continuous basis. During the winter these deaths are easier to see than during the rest of the season. Wondering if the bees are alive within is something akin to the question of Schrödinger’s cat—the bees may be alive in the box, or they may be dead—but opening the box will certainly cause their demise, as all of their heat would escape. I cannot do much for them in the winter but hope. But I do worry about them.
* * *
—
Beyond fretting, there really are no everyday bee-related tasks to accomplish in our part of the world in January, so we beeks look forward to getting a little more sleep at this time of year. During spring and early summer I rise well before dawn to commence my rounds on the rooftops of buildings throughout the five boroughs of New York City and in the surrounding areas where I manage my apiaries. If not in the tri-state area at some beeyard or another, I am driving my pickup truck from place to place, stagnating in city traffic, sparring for parking spots, dealing with doo
rmen, hauling equipment up and down fire escapes and makeshift ladders, handling reporters, and managing beekeeping apprentices. Since I’m not doing many of those things in January, I may sleep as blissfully and deliciously late as six A.M., catch up on non-beekeeping-related reading, or undertake a project that is normally impossible because of the demands imposed on me by my millions of four-winged mistresses.
Sometimes, if I need more to do in January, I’ll follow the warm weather and go elsewhere to find beekeeping activity. Usually I do this through Bees Without Borders, the nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that I founded with my father. BWB’s mission is simple: to try to alleviate poverty via beekeeping endeavors. This organization allows me to combine four things that are personally important: philanthropy, travel, beekeeping, and education. Our operating budget has always been moderate; we are funded primarily through a percentage of the sales of our honey and value-added bee products such as pollen, royal jelly, propolis, and beeswax. Frugal New England beekeepers that we are, with our modest budget we’ve managed to make a small imprint on beekeeping communities in Nigeria, Cameroon, Iraq, Kenya, and Haiti to name a few. This way, aside from assisting people all over the world to gain a better income through working with honey bees, I don’t have to wait for springtime to come to New York to play with bees and get my hands sticky and stung.
My family has been keeping bees since the 1800s. My paternal great-grandfather, Hector Laramée, kept bees in rural Quebec, near the Ontario border, on a small farm where they produced milk and honey. He learned these skills from his own father, who probably learned them from his. Hector worked alongside his wife and many children, including his daughter Aline and her younger sister Aldea, who was to become my grandmother.