Honey and Venom

by Andrew Coté

  We immediately saw to the babies and children, none of whom had taken more than a few stings, if any. Some of the adults had been hit multiple times, and they were checking one another for wayward bees in folds of clothing. A few of the students sweetly tried to be helpful by plucking dozens of stingers out of my face. What I knew but did not care about at that instant was that they were in fact injecting me with yet more venom, as the venom sack that is attached to the end of the hypodermic needle–like barbed stinger continues to pump poison into the flesh of the sting recipient. Grabbing and pulling out the stinger simply forces all of that venom into the skin at once. Some scientists have disputed this claim, stating that the majority of the venom enters the body immediately, and there is no difference whether the stinger is cut out with a knife edge or a fingernail, or is plucked out of the skin like the feathers of an emaciated chicken ready to be thrown into a pot over an open fire. Either way, a bee sting hurts. Dozens to the face hurt more.

  Considering the setback, we decided that we would return the next day in smaller, more manageable groups, in full gear. Then, in a humbler, more somber mood, we plodded the hour and a half back to the classroom, where we resumed the lessons despite the defeat of the morning. In a short while lunch was prepared and served. I joined the others and feasted on a well-earned meal of banana mash, which I consumed with gusto, though my face pulsed with pain and I could feel my skin beginning to tighten around my eyes. At the same time, the joints of my fingers had swollen so much that my fingers looked like linked sausages and were becoming difficult to bend. Oddly, sitting in discomfort there, in the stifling heat and humidity, slowly eating a pile of room-temperature mush, I was quite happy. I found myself thinking of my own beehives atop their varied rooftops in Manhattan and Brooklyn, deep in their winter slumber. I hoped the bees within would still be alive despite the cold, hunkered together and vibrating and shimmying and moving in a specific rhythmic circle pattern in order to share the warmth of their bodies and transfer food to one another. I also reflected upon how lucky I was that I could spend time with these people, who were nearly completely at the mercy of nature for their survival, and yet had accomplished so much with so little. Knowing that it was honey bees and an affinity for them that somehow connected us all filled me with contentment in spite of the disastrous morning. I couldn’t stop grinning; or rather, trying to grin, as my swollen face prevented it. I tried to communicate some of my feelings to Ben and my dad with my eyes. Then, with a mouth that barely moved, I asked, “Does it look bad?”

  My father stopped spooning the gruel into his mouth and looked at me intently with his bright blue eyes. He leaned in close to me and said in a low, serious voice, “It doesn’t look good.” And then he laughed.

  *1 As there are more than 20,000 types of bees in this great big world, and something like 250 in New York City, please note that in these pages when I refer to bees, unless otherwise noted, I refer to the honey bee—Apis mellifera.

  *2 A top-bar hive is a style of beehive made from simplistic and easily found materials, developed in the early 1970s by a pair of Canadian PhDs from the University of Guelph, for use in East Africa. The boxes essentially look like small coffins and have fewer parts than the Langstroth hive. The Langstroth was developed in the 1850s by the Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth and is the most commonly used type of beehive in North America and perhaps the world.

  *3 The 1978 film The Swarm, which boasted a cast including Michael Caine, Richard Chamberlain, Henry Fonda (who was, in real life, a beekeeper, and produced honey he labeled as from Hank’s Bel-Air Hive), Olivia de Havilland, and even Slim Pickens (who by that point had long outgrown his monicker), may be the best known and most ludicrous of all of them, though it has some pretty stiff competition in the ridiculous category from the likes of Killer Bees (1974), The Savage Bees (1976), and a gem from the pre-moon-landing days of 1966, The Deadly Bees. In one scene from The Swarm, Olivia de Havilland, a two-time Academy Award winner, was playing dead and covered in thousands of bees, when one live bee crawled up her nostril. Gravely she maintained her composure for the shot.

  FEBRUARY

  Everyone should have two or three hives of bees. Bees are easier to keep than a dog or a cat. They are more interesting than gerbils.

  —SUE HUBBELL, A Book of Bees

  As counterintuitive as it may seem, honey bees and penguins have something in common: Both huddle together for warmth. When Antarctic temperatures reach as low as 40 degrees below freezing, emperor penguins waddle their way to a central point and tuck themselves into a tight cluster to maintain a common core temperature. They shift and rotate from the outside of the bevy, where the brunt of the extreme cold is felt, to the center where the temperatures are far cozier. These tuxedo-wearing swimming birds continue to alternate with one another so as to share the burden of cold as long as the extreme temperatures require them to do so.

  Back in the northeastern United States, honey bees, like their web-footed, fish-eating, better-dressed friends, form a tight cluster around her majesty the queen in order to survive the frigid temperatures outside the beehive. Her royal highness stays in the center and remains warm—her environs maintained at a consistent 95 degrees—while her daughters and few sons rotate, sharing food gathered from the outer perimeter of the cluster and warmth garnered from within. The oldest worker bees, born at the tail end of summer, die and are allowed to fall to the bottom of the hive.

  I grew up thirty-five miles from New York City on the southern tip of penguin-free New England in the coastal blue-collar town of Norwalk, Connecticut, where my father’s family settled in the 1930s. Once upon a time Norwalk was known for oysters, hat making, and as the last producer of rock candy in the United States. The oyster industry is slowly making a comeback after a century of steady decline. The rock candy industry, along with the hat-making business, has long since hit rock bottom.

  Norwalk is surrounded by some of the wealthiest towns in the United States—Westport, New Canaan, Darien, and Wilton, as well as Greenwich just down the road—in what is referred to as the Gold Coast. Still, Norwalk continues to lag far behind its neighbors in terms of financial means. When I was growing up in the seventies, it was home to sanitation workers, police officers, firefighters, and other public works employees—basically, anyone whose job it was to serve the posh neighboring towns.

  My own family is dug into Norwalk like ticks. My father is one of ten siblings, and my mother one of eight, so multiply that by spouses and children and we end up with quite a large litter. My father was a lieutenant for the Norwalk Fire Department for more than thirty years, and my mother worked for Southern New England Telephone, starting as a switchboard operator at sixteen. Our extended family has long been embedded in the city’s police and fire departments, the schools, the library system, city hall, the now-defunct draft board, the department of transportation, and other municipal organizations. In other words, we’ve had a stake in the community for years. And despite Norwalk’s population of about eighty thousand, we know most everyone, or we know someone who knows them.

  During our elementary and middle school years, my brother, Michael, and I each had our own newspaper routes. This was back in the days when The Hour, then a locally owned and run newspaper, was delivered by children on bikes after school. Now the paper is owned by the Hearst empire and is delivered before dawn by adults in cars.

  In our neighborhood, houses were modest and on small lots. We lived within walking distance of our elementary school and the sprawling, wooded, and hilly cemetery, where my paternal grandfather hid liquor bottles, kept rabbits, and dug graves, in that order of personal importance.

  When I was growing up, honey bees provided me with a sense of well-being and stability, and, again, the opportunity to spend time with my father. But although beekeeping was clearly in my bloodline, it would be decades before I would consider it to be anything more than a hobby. Or, better put
, until I had run out of other things that I could do to earn a living. I have been either fired or strongly encouraged to move on from almost every other job I have ever had over the past thirty years, which makes for a rather unimpressive résumé, I admit.

  Still, in the early 2000s, I was motoring along as a full-time tenured associate professor for the state of Connecticut. I taught a few different courses, depending on the semester, including the basic English and composition courses taken by nearly all college freshmen in the U.S. education system, as well as English as a second language. Despite the routine of the job, I loved teaching, being in the classroom, the excitement of sharing and imparting knowledge. And it never escaped my mind that I was the first Coté in our clutch to have earned a university degree, which made my parents proud—prouder still when I went on to teach at university level. I was also among the first generation on my father’s side whose mother tongue is English, so I held my foreign students in high esteem and admired their pluck to start a new life under the yoke of a new language. But the monotony of departmental meetings, community meetings, office hours, and all of the mundane and mind-numbing obligations that went with the territory in academia started wearing on me.

  I did well at this institution. I had positive student reviews, was faculty adviser to the honor society, taught self-defense courses, organized blood drives, and in general was part of the community. But I was becoming more and more disheartened with my professional situation in some very real ways, and despite the melodrama of the phrasing, the honey bee and her positive influences saved me from being stuck in a career that, while noble and worthy, had ceased to be fulfilling for me. I could have easily remained at a job that I grew to dislike in order to take advantage of the steady income and benefits and promise of a pension; a state job is like a lobster pot—not so difficult to get into but very difficult to get out of.

  It was the allure of the bees that wrenched me out of it.

  I had long ago graduated from helping my father with his colonies to producing honey from my own beehives. I sold some of that honey from a farm stand at my house and even supplied a small quantity to a few grocery stores in the area. My brother, Michael—also a beekeeper, as well as a police officer—and I sometimes sold at the local farmers’ markets together, and we always assisted my father and helped each other during spring buildup and at harvest time, which lent a nice familial vibe to what we did.

  While I was teaching, I received some unsolicited press coverage for my extracurricular beekeeping. This wasn’t perceived as a good thing in the eyes of my administration. At one point the president of the college called me into her office to suggest that I keep my beekeeping life and my academic life separate. She was referring to an article about honey bees she’d read in The New York Times that I was interviewed for, in which I’d mentioned the name of the college. As far as I could tell, this was the only time our small college was ever noted by the Gray Lady, and the school’s PR person had already congratulated me on the coup. But the president clearly didn’t agree.

  On the one hand, I couldn’t do much about stories of my vocation and my avocation intertwining; my position as a professor at a state institution was public record, and if a reporter writing about my beekeeping wanted to mention at which college I taught, it was easy enough to get the information. On the other hand, I absolutely bore some—most, probably—of the responsibility for the ultimate dissolution of my relationship with the college. And as the bees continued to lull me away from my responsibilities at the college, dissolve it did.

  One day, I called in sick but was subsequently spotted blathering on about honey bees on a live television show. The next year I was AWOL at work when I was noted, again in The New York Times, as being present at a bee-related fiasco in a piece that mercifully made no mention of my place of employment. I was clearly permitting bees to encroach into my professional life in a way that demonstrated that perhaps I ought to give in to their sweet pleasures and forgo another year of paper cuts and windowless classrooms.

  Having been a professor since my late twenties, I considered being an academic as part of my identity. I took my title and the position seriously, dressed the part in a suit and tie—though not a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches—and truly tried my best to do well. This, though my own academic history and ascension into academia was unconventional, to say the least. I attended Brien McMahon High School in Norwalk, but quit after my freshman year. Despite having no high school diploma, I managed to start classes at Norwalk Community College a few years later simply because no one in admissions picked up on the fact that I had not finished high school. (Years later I taught at the high school from which I’d never graduated, and taught at the college that had admitted me as a student without a diploma.) Then, at the age of twenty-two, I taught tenth grade composition at the American School, Colegio Americano, in Guayaquil, Ecuador. That lasted several months, until the director, who was aware of my certification shortcomings when he hired me, found a replacement teacher who actually had the appropriate four-year college degree that I had not yet earned.

  But I enjoyed being in the classroom, and in the end I bounced around, attending five colleges and universities in three countries before finally cobbling together a bachelor’s degree at the age of twenty-six. No one was more surprised than I was when I proceeded to procure my master’s the following year. I had doubled up on classes and worked full-time as a sort of house mother at a private Japanese boarding school called Keio Academy in Purchase, New York, and as a ballroom dance instructor at an Arthur Murray in Darien, Connecticut, where my job was fundamentally to drag elderly women around the floor and venture not to drop them.

  Then, in the late 1990s, just after getting my master’s in education from Manhattanville College, I was awarded a grant to teach at a newly formed English language department in a small university in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, through George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Following that I landed a job teaching for Greenwich Public Schools, where, once again, I did not shine my brightest. I loved the community and my colleagues, and certainly the students. Still, after two years I knew for certain that I was not cut out for working with middle school kids. The administration did not try to dissuade me when I left that gig to be a Fulbright professor teaching master’s students in eastern Europe just prior to taking on the full-time position with the state of Connecticut.

  All this to say that even though my own education had been erratic, I took all of my life experiences and tried to apply them in the classroom. I poured every bit of my heart and soul into teaching, be it an English language club at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, literature courses at Univerzitet Džemal Bijedić in Mostar, pedagogy courses at Universitatea de Stat “Alecu Russo” in Bălţi, or English as a second language classes at Norwalk Community College and Housatonic Community College, both in Connecticut.

  But, ultimately, bees won me over. I traded in my tie for a hive tool, my suit jacket for a bee veil, my briefcase for a smoker.

  * * *

  —

  Whatever misgivings I had, once I made the decision to leave academics it felt totally right, and I never looked back. I spoke to my union representative. I signed exit paperwork with human resources and, excited and terrified, left my cushy, tenured state job. I did not even pack up my office. I left all of my books and files behind, put my keys on the desk, said a few goodbyes, and walked out of the ivory tower in the direction of my apiary.

  It was frightening in some ways, exhilarating in others, to voluntarily walk away from such a comfortable situation—to leave health insurance, a pension, and a steady paycheck behind. And, truth be told, there couldn’t be many better jobs: We worked no more than four days a week, a maximum of six hours per day if that, and generally just thirty weeks per year. It was the best-paying full-time job with part-time hours ever invented. But I dove headfirst into beekeeping and trusted that the ladi
es in the hive would save me from a terrible fate. My trust was well placed.

  After spending a few years tooling around Connecticut, taking care of my own beehives, and participating in a few farmers’ markets in the Constitution State, I moved my base of operations to New York City. I started by joining one market, which blossomed into a few, where I met many clients who requested beekeeping services.

  Now I’m often asked to install beehives, as it has become popular in some circles to adorn the rooftops of upscale restaurants, hotels, and businesses with beehives. The flagship Brooks Brothers store on Madison Avenue and Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan now has four beehives on the roof, one for each of the original Brooks brothers. (Claudio and Debra Del Vecchio, the owners of Brooks Brothers, have been good to me. When I went off to Italy to give a TEDx Talk, they kindly insisted on providing me with a new outfit.) I also installed ten beehives at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where the remains of the Brooks brothers can be found. I manage several others in nearby Industry City in Sunset Park. My single largest partnership is with the Durst Organization, which has dozens of beehives on several of its properties in the Big Apple. I’ve given talks on the importance of pollinators (like honey bees) to our fragile ecosystem at Durst buildings in tandem with Helena Durst, who’s a former board member of Just Food, one of the nonprofits that helped push for the legalization of honey bees in New York City. Then there are the InterContinental New York Barclay, where I work with Chef Peter Betz, and the New York Hilton Midtown, where Zac Efron and I filmed a Netflix special about sustainable food, and many other places with great views and high profiles that now have apiaries that I maintain. I love the fact that my office is no office at all, but rather rooftops with billion-dollar views.

  Keeping bees in a densely populated urban metropolis such as New York City may seem like an unlikely enterprise, but in fact urban beekeeping has been around for millennia. It was practiced three thousand years ago in Tel Rehov in Israel by ancient Egyptians and Greeks, and has been a part of New York City for centuries. The orchards once in the Lower East Side—around what is now Orchard Street—were at one time flush with bees. Just after the Civil War ended, Harper’s Bazaar ran a story about a woman who managed forty beehives atop a building on Broadway and sold the honey to make a tidy profit. In 1881, on the roof of 14 Park Place, the proprietors of Bee-Keeper’s Magazine kept a sizable apiary, and produced queens for sale that were shipped as far away as “Chile, New Zealand and the Sandwich Islands.” More than a century ago New York City orphanages and hospitals maintained rooftop beehives as a means of providing sweets for their respective kitchens. The history of beekeeping in New York City could fill another book.