Honey and Venom

by Andrew Coté

  One day Aline married a dapper, handsome, well-dressed man named Désiré Coté. Very much against the wishes of her kin, Aline moved to the United States with her new husband. The warnings of her clan unheeded, she soon found herself in an abusive relationship with a cruel and inexorable alcoholic. One day she wandered onto the railway tracks that passed beside the cemetery near the dilapidated house where they rented rooms, and was snuffed out by a Metro North train. Her two daughters watched the terrible incident. It was long rumored within the family that Aline had committed suicide to escape Désiré, but her two daughters firmly testified that it was an accident. In any event, she was gone.

  At that cemetery, about ten feet from those tracks, where plots were the cheapest, Aline’s widower bought a grave and had her interred with no marker. He took the settlement money from the railroad company—a small fortune back then, earmarked for his two young daughters—and spent it on himself, mostly on alcohol and clothes, since Désiré fancied himself quite the dandy. Meanwhile his children were destitute, hungry, and literally dressed in rags.

  Immediately thereafter, between the two world wars, Aldea moved to the United States to retrieve the four children of her recently departed sister. Désiré preyed upon her as well, putting her in the family way, and thus Aldea, a devout Catholic girl, married her former brother-in-law. In time she begot her own brood of six children from her brother-in-law cum husband.

  The similarities of the only two households Aldea had ever known north and south of the border mostly included stark poverty and no indoor privy. Other than the usual hardships of rearing a large brood under these conditions, and a shared ethnic and cultural heritage, the households bore little resemblance to each other. Whereas Aldea’s father, Hector, was a loving, hardworking farmer, Désiré squandered what little money there was on his own wants rather than provide food for his ten children. In turn, those children, including my father, Norm, were forced to scavenge for food behind grocery stores, telling the store employees they were looking for scraps to feed the family rabbits. They would take these bits home and separate the edible from the inedible and devour what they could, sometimes giving the remnants to the rabbits, but usually consuming it all themselves.

  As a result of his circumstances, my father, growing up during a time of great economic prosperity in the United States following the end of the Second World War, was severely underweight and regularly went to bed hungry, brushing his teeth with his finger for a toothbrush and salt for toothpaste. Malnourished herself, his mother, Aldea, lost her teeth and could not afford to replace them or get dentures for nearly two decades. She gummed her meat when she was lucky enough to get any.

  As a young boy, my father spoke only French. In elementary school some classmates taught and encouraged him to call the teacher a “son of a bitch,” which young Norm did, with no understanding of the meaning. For that he was kicked out of Winnepaugh Elementary School “until he can learn to speak English!” said the principal. Eventually he made his way back to the classroom, but not on a regular basis and not for long.

  Aldea’s move to New England began a thirty-year lapse in my immediate family’s apiary activities until my father returned to his beekeeping roots in our backyard in Norwalk, Connecticut. At the time, my grandmother wasn’t living close by, so Norm set out to teach himself what he needed to know during his downtime at his firefighting job—between car wrecks and house fires.

  His small plot of land was no more than a quarter acre, and also held the small 1950s Cape Cod–style house in which we lived. Norwalk was a far cry from the dairy and honey farm that his ancestors had tended in Témiscaming, Quebec. Témiscaming, on the rare occasion it is thought of at all, is known as the administrative headquarters of the Algonquin Nation, and for winters that are harsh even by Canadian standards. Late in the season, before the snows, my great-grandfather would carry his many beehives down into the basement and place them on the dirt floor to wait out the brutal winters. Then he would fasten ropes between the house, the barn, and the outhouse so that nobody would get lost in the high snowdrifts when walking between the three.

  I got involved with honey bees because they were a means to an end: I wanted to spend time with my father, a man who is at once tough and gentle, stern and loving. And always hardworking. Given that he had a full-time job, and beekeeping took up chunks of his time at home, helping him with the hives was a logical way to be in his company. As a firefighter, my father often smelled of smoke after work. He often smelled of smoke when he returned from his apiaries, too, the result of using a bee smoker, the oversized tin can–looking gizmo used to puff smoke into a beehive to distract and disorient the bees. This smoky smell, which I came to associate with my father, will always be pleasurable to me. The actual heavy, sweaty, and often difficult bee work never bothered me—in fact I still relish it—and any discomfort associated with it was unimportant relative to spending time with my dad. I couldn’t have guessed it then, but as I shadowed my Quebecois father in his rickety pickup truck, my appreciation for the honey bee was cultivated and the family tradition was passed to yet another generation, from our father to my brother, Mike, and me. Nowadays Norm’s grandchildren are in on the action, too.

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  I’ve always loved to travel, and bees have enhanced that passion. The majority of my twenties were spent living in Kyoto, where I earned my bachelor’s degree in Japanese studies and studied martial arts six days a week. My father, it turns out, also loves to travel, though he wasn’t able to do so until his children were grown. As a young man he did get to see some of the world courtesy of the U.S. Navy, but other than that, until his two boys were rousted from the family hive, he was too busy cobbling together a living for his growing boys, to whom he and my mother are still fiercely dedicated.

  Once I hit the age of majority, my father and I started traveling the world together. On shoestring budgets, we’ve hiked England along the Coast to Coast Walk; biked from London to Marrakech long before GPS or the Internet would have made the ten-week trip easier; climbed Mount Kilimanjaro; and visited far-flung areas of Uganda. Way back in the late 1980s in Guatemala, we had the notion to visit local beekeepers rather than spend all our time hanging around backpackers’ haunts and tourist spots. We figured meeting local farmers and sharing the day-to-day routine of their lives as much as they would allow—seeing their homes and fields, visiting their apiaries, and breaking bread with them—would give us a productive, and gratifying, way to go off-script.

  We were generally welcomed by our fellow beekeepers, who seemed to relish hearing about our beekeeping practices as much as we enjoyed learning about theirs. We had a lot in common, as it turns out—most obviously a shared affection for the little four-winged creatures that transcended language barriers. We enjoyed the cultural exchange of comparing and sharing how we each lit a smoker; what we burned in it to confound the bees (burlap for us, dried elephant dung in Tanzania, willow bark in southern Russia, old shredded beekeeping equipment in Finland, mugwort in Korea and China, sumac bobs in Kalamazoo); how we harvested the honey and what applications it took on in our cuisines; and the manner in which we marketed the honey and products of the hive. As best we could, we discussed or demonstrated to one another the minutiae of our beekeeping lives, and we loved every minute of it. The local beekeepers seemed to find the exchange fulfilling, too. As for my father and me, we found the whole thing far more satisfying to our souls than visiting yet another colonial church.

  That experience encouraged the two of us to continue taking beekeeping-centric trips. Soon we were seeking out as well as being sought out for projects by beekeeping clubs in places like Fiji and Zimbabwe, where club members asked for classes on topics such as queen rearing and basic bee biology. Sometimes they needed specific equipment, like a centrifuge to better harvest the honey, or a refractometer to measure the moisture content of the honey to see if it was sui
table for harvesting without the fear of fermentation. These equipment requests raised the stakes somewhat. No longer just vacationers with an interest in bees, no longer just bystanders, we were becoming involved in local beekeeping communities who were looking to us for help.

  And so we incorporated Bees Without Borders as a charitable organization. Which is how I found myself, in early January 2009, in Uganda, where I was about to learn one of the most important lessons of my beekeeping life. Namely, always pay attention to the rules of beekeeping as put forth by the bees. Even when you wish they weren’t true. And the best way to eat overcooked, gristly goat meat is on a stick.

  Norm, my friend Ben Gardner, and I were in a small village in the mountains along the Uganda-Congo border, helping about fifty or so local farmers hone their beekeeping skills. We had traveled to East Africa at the request of a small agricultural collective that wanted help establishing a market for honey they did not have, from bees they had yet to appropriate, with skills that as yet eluded them. But they wrote an amazing proposal and hit all the right notes in what was to be a series of not-quite-completely-aboveboard applications coming out of a far-flung, poverty-stricken border community from people desperate to get any kind of help they could. We didn’t exactly blame them for deceiving us—they wanted and needed help—we just had to figure out the best way to help them, despite their lack of transparency.

  We traveled to Uganda via England. After a twelve-hour stopover in London that included warm beer and shepherd’s pie, we made our way to Entebbe, and from there to Kampala. Our chock-full agenda was the result of months of preparation; we’d had to organize transportation, interpreters, guides, instructions for carpenters, models for the classes, and all sorts of materials and handouts for the students. We tried to think of everything. But particularly in Africa, even the best-laid plans need to be flexible, and we knew that things could change day by day, maybe even hour by hour. That old adage of hoping for the best but preparing for the worst comes in handy when you’re traveling in a landlocked region where only about 20 percent of the population has access to electricity.

  Corruption is an insidious problem in Uganda. In our experience, a project with a specific timeline is at the mercy of anyone with even an iota of authority. And power, when held, is wielded like a blunt instrument. It’s often used to further the selfish and shortsighted interests of those in authority, and not the people or groups they were elected to represent. Yet despite the discomfort and corruption, it’s always worth the effort and frustration to bring beekeeping skills to people in remote places. To see the immediate positive impact it has on the lives of the beekeepers, their families, and their community is humbling and changes all of our lives for the better.

  Before leaving the Kampala area we visited an orphanage run by a Dane and well funded by Swiss bankers. The orphanage was clean, tidy, and well built—all thanks to the dedication and hard work of the tireless local staff. The paint was fresh, the floors were level, and the roofs didn’t leak in the often-heavy rains. It was free from the pools of brackish water with which many compounds are plagued. The most heartening characteristic of the place, though, was its population—close to 150 healthy, well-fed children. They were cheerful and full of promise in a country that all too often offers neither cheer nor promise for the orphaned or anyone else. Norm, who has always loved and been loved by babies, was in heaven as the smaller kids gathered round and played with him. If he hadn’t had his wife and grandchildren waiting for him at home he would have happily spent the six-month minimum time commitment volunteering there.

  As we wandered from the orphanage’s grounds we came to some enormous anthills, some six feet high and eight feet in diameter—basically the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. “Trample these anthills,” the Dane told us, “and besides the ants getting into your pants, they will just rebuild them in a day.” Returning to the property, we found the orphanage’s dozen or so beehives, introduced by a volunteer who had since left the country. The staff hoped to increase the number of active hives—at this point there were only two—thereby increasing their honey yield, with the goal of having the children work the beehives and sell the honey as a means of income generation. Local beekeeper Lesster Leow, Singaporean by birth, was then managing the hives for the orphanage. He had already worked out an arrangement with some retailers in Europe to authenticate the purity of the honey and had established a niche market there that imported and sold the honey, with portions of the profit funneling back into the orphanage. It was a sweet deal.

  “In 2005, before I was working with the orphanage, my first batch of EU-certified honey was selected to be supplied to a local supermarket in Kampala,” he told me. “A Swiss banker spotted my little jar of honey sitting quietly on the shelf of that supermarket. He was searching for Ugandan products for Switzerland that could be sold to raise funds for the orphanage. We came to an agreement, and for the first time ever, the floodgates were opened for Ugandan honey to be exported to Switzerland.” Lesster runs many other hives in Uganda as well as those at the orphanage. He sells some of his honey harvest from those hives locally, and he and his colleagues export the rest to Asia. He is nothing if not enterprising.

  We visited the orphanage on New Year’s Eve 2008. That evening, Norm watched fireworks from the balcony of our small hotel. Ben and I sat down below in the outdoor restaurant, drinking Nile beers and watching the same fireworks shot off the roofs of the upscale hotels. We drank, avoided the bevy of local prostitutes, and listened and watched as two young women belted out their renditions of “Stand by Me,” punctuated by explosions overhead. There wasn’t enough beer in the country to make that off-key caterwauling worth enduring, so Ben and I returned to our shared room for a few hours. At six A.M. Lesster picked us up for a long trek west in his SUV. No air-conditioning.

  The journey was long, hot, and bumpy, but Lesster’s company made it pleasant. In addition to his work with bees, he also had a small shop along a busy road where he sold locally made crafts such as carved wooden masks, handwoven raffia baskets, wall tapestries, and jewelry made from everything from bottle caps to tightly wound paper dipped in glue. Lesster sold only goods that were truly locally made, not the usual tourist trinkets passed off as local but in reality manufactured in Kenya, Indonesia, or China. By supporting local craftspeople, his shop directly benefited the communities surrounding Kampala.

  During the marathon drive to our first destination, Kasese, we passed several coffin shops, rickety stores that displayed their simply made coffins on the side of the road. Life expectancy in Uganda is decades shorter than it is in the developed world, so there is, unfortunately, a large demand for coffins. In his late sixties at the time, Norm was already older than 98 percent of all Ugandans. Poverty, disease, and instability breed untimely deaths. Most Ugandans don’t make it to their mid-fifties.

  I often hear people who don’t really know any better pontificating about how poor people from rural regions have a stronger connection to nature than people in wealthier, more industrialized countries do, and a greater respect for animals and the earth. My experience indicates otherwise. For instance, in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where I grew up, as well as in Manhattan, where I live now, there are psychologists specializing in assisting emotionally distraught dogs. While I am not against such a thing, since canines can surely suffer emotional trauma just as humans do, people who are chronically hungry do not generally have the luxury of worrying about whether a mule is beaten, let alone having emotional issues. They have bigger problems, like rampant disease and starvation. Beekeepers in deeply impoverished areas rarely have any passion or compassion for the bees, a sentiment that can perhaps be understood in context. These beekeepers often burn out the hives, kill all the bees, and take all the valuables—namely the honey. They do not smoke the bees out, allowing them to live; they burn them out.

  Even the few who have had training with working hives (not feral colo
nies) will still, for the most part, pull all of the honey out of the hive rather than leave enough for the bees to survive. Then again, in a country where a sizable percentage of the population subsists on around a dollar a day, it can be difficult to convince a beekeeper not to grab all that he or she can, much like the country’s leaders. Tomorrow isn’t promised. Something or someone else might come along and steal the honey—a neighbor, an animal—and then there would be nothing. So some just grab what they can while they can, in these cases, to the detriment of the bees.

  During the bumpy, nausea-inducing drive, we encountered baboons, kobs, massive warthogs, and huge garbage-eating storks. Certainly one thing can be said of Uganda: It is green—green in every direction as far as we could see. The lush natural beauty is spectacular. At some point we stopped for deep-fried tilapia from Lake George, and then we traveled the road that traversed Queen Elizabeth National Park for several hours. The lush natural beauty there is spectacular. In the middle of the park we met up with one of Lesster’s apprentices, a local teenager named Benjamin who had a few dozen beehives sprinkled along a steep hillside and was starting to make his own living as a beekeeper, at least in part.

  We crossed the equator on the way to Kasese. We crossed it more than once, in fact, as the road snaked north and south over the imaginary line. Though usually flying no more than three miles at a time, honey bees must travel the collective equivalent distance of two times around the equator, or fifty thousand miles, to gather enough nectar to produce a pound of honey. Norm, Ben, and I had a much easier time reaching our goal, stopping to take silly tourist photos of one another standing at the equator with one foot in either hemisphere. The road continued to snake west, on even more questionable roads, to what truly felt like past the middle of nowhere toward the far edge of nothingness. Once we reached Kasese, we bought some supplies, bade goodbye for the time being to Lesster, and headed even farther off the beaten path to the mountains near the border with Congo.