Honey and Venom

by Andrew Coté

  In 1905, when the Parks Department of the Bronx advertised a city apiarist position that paid $1,200 per annum, the most qualified candidate, who had scored 97 percent on the civil examination, was a former schoolteacher, Emma Haggerty. She, however, was blocked from accepting the position since as a woman she was not permitted to wear pants, which are generally preferred when working with bees, and part of the uniform for the job. The authorities seemed “to believe that one of the qualifications for political beekeeping is the right to vote and wear trousers.” The Brooklyn Eagle protested, “A woman who is willing to take the chance of getting stung at swarming time ought to be a pretty good candidate.”

  There hasn’t been a lull in New York City beekeeping activity for hundreds of years. Honey bees have been in New York City for quite some time, buzzing about and minding their own beeswax.

  For eleven consecutive recent years, though, beekeeping in New York City was a covert affair, complete with underground networks of enthusiasts and contraband honey exchanges. In the decades prior to 1999, beekeepers in the city generally kept a low profile, but no one was worried about breaking the law, because there was no law to break. But under the Giuliani administration in 1999, beekeeping, specifically “the harboring of honey bees,” became illegal. So, in 1999, when the last of the checkered cabs disappeared from the New York City landscape, honey bees became by decree insectus non gratus in the Big Apple.

  It was not again a legitimate undertaking until the New York City Beekeepers Association, Just Food, and other like-minded groups got together and petitioned the city to allow the practice in the five boroughs. After all, at that point urban beekeeping was permitted in Boise, Idaho. Idaho! No disrespect at all intended to the great city of Boise, which has much to be proud of, what with its flat-track roller derby league, the Treasure Valley Rollergirls. But there is no reason for New York City to play second fiddle to the eightieth largest metropolitan area in the country. New Yorkers like to lead the pack. I found it mildly humiliating that my fellow city residents and I could not maintain beehives while Boise could enjoy both potatoes and all the fresh honey they could get their bees to muster. Thank goodness that since 2010 the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene—which issues dog licenses, handles tuberculosis control, and oversees issues relating to honey bees, now once again bestows their blessings upon the fine (and less fine) beekeepers of Gotham City in ruling urban beekeeping permissible. It is also worth noting that the name DOHMH was not chosen specifically with beekeepers in mind, though it does feel appropriate for the many beekeepers with emotional issues.

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  During the last weeks of February, most human beekeeping activity is as dormant as the honey bees are. Except for those rare balmy days when we’re checking on our hives, we beekeepers are holed up in our homes, huddled against the elements, planning and plotting for the season ahead: how to improve on a hive configuration, how to maximize yield, how to find new and better locations for honey bees, how to conspire at once with and against Mother Nature to make the best of the bees’ and our joint labor.

  The New York City Beekeepers Association—of which I am the de facto head, having founded it in 2007 when I was feeling a need for some unity and camaraderie among urban beekeepers—usually holds introductory beekeeping classes in February and March, and teaches theoretical beekeeping to lead up to the practical beekeeping that starts in April. Classes are usually capped at fifty people in order to handle the questions and needs of the students. Additionally, we have an apprenticeship program that takes a dozen people per year; we hold meetings with speakers who are specialists in the field; we have group harvests; and we do the sorts of things that beekeeping groups all around the world do. The bees are the glue (propolis, perhaps) that binds us together.

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  There are two castes of female honey bees, the queen and the worker, and one male caste, the drone. Of the tens of thousands of honey bees in a colony, several hundred at most are drones—always a small minority. Drones are as few as they are misunderstood, yet they are as vital to the colony as any of the other players. The drones are the unsung athletes of the hive. They spend many afternoons in active mating flight, making up to half a dozen trips to a drone congregation area in search of unmated queens. When not pursuing their intense sexual search, they take a good amount of rest and feed well on pollen and honey to keep their strength up. Still, these male bees don’t work, can’t sting, and, though most never realize their amorous ambitions, would seem to live only to copulate with a queen. They have something of a tarnished reputation among humans. This is not out of line with most males of any species. It’s not all the drone’s fault. He grew up without a father. In fact, he has no father. It is not that his father went out for cigarettes one day and never returned—he actually has no father. The drone is hatched from an unfertilized egg, and has only the single (haploid) set of chromosomes from the mother, hence no father. His mother, the queen, has two sets of chromosomes, so she has both a mother and a father, giving the fatherless drone grandparents. Drones have a fascinating and unique anatomy. Imagine a penis that resides, turned inside out, within the abdomen, emerging for only one explosive ejaculation per lifetime. One. That’s it. And afterward, the drone dies, having ejaculated with such force that it killed him. That’s what makes the drone so special. Explosive balls.

  Of the triumvirate within the hive, most people think of the queen and the worker bees before they think of the lowly drone, if indeed they think of him at all. The very word has taken on a pejorative meaning; it is not a compliment to be told that one “drones on.” Yet there is much perspective to be gained about him. His is a life all about service and sacrifice. Sometimes, like a well-meaning guest, the drone tries to earn his keep. He might be called upon to keep the brood warm, which he does by planting his bulky, largely useless self atop the babies in their cells. He assists in circulating airflow within the hive by flapping his strong wings—this to reduce dampness and to keep fresh air in the chambers. He may even attempt some saber rattling in defense of the hive, by making as much noise as he can with those same wings when enemies appear—although, without a stinger, this amounts to a boisterous show of smoke and mirrors derived from his loud hum and sizable stature. He can’t really defend the hive. He’s a loudmouth with nothing to back up his bravado. Like lots of men.

  It is easier to explain what the drone cannot do rather than what little he can. The drone, who is born without the abilities and physical attributes of his sister the worker, is unable to gather nectar, pollen, or water for the colony. Since the drone is unable to sting or to steal honey, he is permitted to enter any hive, not only his own, and this only if the guard bees allow his reentry. During his meanderings from hive to hive, he might well spread disease from one abode to the next. This does not enhance his reputation among his co-workers or keepers. In fact, he is often kicked out of the hive once spring and summer have lapsed into autumn, and will die of starvation or exposure—that is, if he was not barred from the hive after one of his trips to the drone congregation area. In any event, by then, his services are no longer needed. He is something like a relative who visits, eats, borrows the car and a little pocket money, and then remains weeks beyond any reasonable gauge of decorum. Eventually, he is given the boot.

  So there he is, the poor, misunderstood drone, an awkward oaf at the cool kids’ table. His primary purpose is to fertilize a queen, should such a need arise. So, in fact, he is the party when that happens. Though the drone has no stinger, he does have an endophallus. Like the worker bee’s barbed stinger—though not the same in terms of evolution or function—the drone’s penis is barbed. In both cases, it is designed so that once inserted, it stays where it is put, because it is fully inverted into the body of the queen, breaking off at the boundary to the outside after entry. Physically, he has a stout body and large eyes. He needs that vision in
order to spot a randy queen when she is seeking a series of mates for a tumble in the clouds. As he is large and full-bodied, he stands out from the female workers, and is often mistaken for the queen by novice beekeepers. He is usually shorter in length than the queen bee, his stout midsection a direct contrast to her canal-boat-shaped, tapered abdomen. Despite his hefty size—he reminds me of the AMC Pacer my mother drove when I was a child in the seventies—the drone can and must fly very fast in order to catch that vixen of a queen when she is courting.

  This once-in-a-lifetime feat of athleticism occurs in the drone-congregating area, a watering hole in the sky where thousands of drones from various colonies congregate and wait for a receptive queen to enter the zone. Think, if you will, of a bar whose clientele is exclusively male, yet day after day the men hang around hoping for a woman to walk in. In the bee world, when the virgin queen departs from the hive on her mating flight, she enters the drone-congregating area. The drones detect her via thousands of receptor plates on their antennae, skipping the drinks and the small talk. The fastest and the strongest catch up to the queen and mate with her. But it is suicide by sex. When the drone’s endophallus enters the queen, his abdomen contracts and his muscles tighten. This restricts airflow and the drone soon dies.

  His big eyes blazing and his manhood engorged, if the drone flies fast enough to beat out the majority of his contemporaries, he mates with the queen. It’s better to be the first to mate with the queen, simply because any drone that comes after must first remove the previous drone’s endophallus prior to inserting his own. In fact, the drone comes equipped with a small hook on the end of his erect penis (or maybe it is on one of his legs, my sources vary), and with that he grips and removes the genitals of his predecessor prior to inserting his own pride. An average of fifteen of the strongest and fastest drones catch and mount the queen, and mate with her—which all takes place while the respective parties are flying upward toward the stratosphere.

  Upon completion of the act, which is under five seconds*1 (but five seconds of a six-week lifetime) per drone, with the entire event over in under a few minutes in most cases, each suitor has his penis torn out of their abdomen and they fall dying to earth, presumably with mixed emotions. They may or may not leave their hearts literally as well as figuratively behind, as their heart is located in the abdomen, and their abdomens and their bits certainly tear away. Thus their manhood, such as it is, is left within her. That spring day, the queen then returns to the hive and usually never leaves or mates again, unless she leaves the hive to swarm. And the next day, somewhere just outside the hive, piled irregularly, there is a heap of broken-off drone phallus tips, or remaining pieces of phalli, that were removed from the inside of the queen bee by faithful worker bees, who surely have a difficult time explaining that task on their résumé.

  But in February, at least in the Northeast, the idea of mating is still just a twinkle in the oversized eye of the drone. February hereabouts is cold, certainly too cold for mating and usually too cold for leaving the hive at all.*2 My father, who is now in his late seventies and still lifts weights several times per week and works minimum twelve hours per day, used to take care of beehives for a number of families and estates in Westchester County, New York, and Connecticut. One day in February he got a call from a woman he’d met at the gym. As mentioned, Norwalk is surrounded by well-to-do towns, and this woman had hired him to take care of beehives on her property. Among other endeavors, she had been a caterer, and around this time she’d started to produce a television show out of her home on Turkey Hill Road in Westport, Connecticut. She had a nice garden, scores of rare-breed chickens like Ayam Cemani and Araucana, which laid more eggs than a small army could consume, and an extensive collection of antique stoves kept in a barn. Her name was Martha Stewart, and she has come to be well known for her skills in the kitchen and in the household. In addition to maintaining her hives, my father attended parties and other functions as her guest.

  On the February day that she called him, it had been snowing and she was worried that her bees were dead. “There are so many bodies out in front of the hives!” she told him.

  “That’s a good sign. It means that the bees inside are alive and throwing out the dead.”

  “Can you just come and check on them?”

  Pause. Sigh. “Okay, Martha.”

  So Norm got into his pickup truck and drove to Westport in the snow. He checked the beehives with a stethoscope and found them to be alive and well, as expected. He was ready to leave when Martha, in her pajamas, called for him to come into the kitchen. She asked him if he’d like some coffee. “Or even a cappuccino?” she enticed further.

  Norm looked past her to see the impressive machine in which Martha would make the beverage. “It looked like a spaceship, but with more knobs and dials,” he told me later. He started to step into the house but was quickly told to take off his shoes before entering the kitchen. Soon, he and Martha were sitting and sipping their hot, foamy cappuccinos and talking about bees. “I should have stolen a few fancy eggs from the coop on my way out for the extra time,” he said, laughing.

  Martha was a stickler as a client. For most clients, he would usually remove full honey supers—the boxes filled with surplus honey meant to harvest—and take them to his place to extract the honey. But Martha insisted that everything be done on her premises to ensure that it was not commingled with any other honey.

  My father oftentimes took me with him to his clients’ homes to assist him, and to learn from him. I never spoke too much with Martha during any of these visits; our acquaintanceship came much later, when she would visit me at the Union Square Greenmarket and later when I appeared on her show. My father observed, “She is nice, but she likes to talk. They all do. It’s nice to talk about bees, but you can burn your whole workday talking about bees and not getting any bee work done. So wherever you go, it’s better to get in and out without being seen.”

  In addition to Martha Stewart, my father had quite a few clients and a long waiting list of hopefuls who wished to obtain his services. This made him selective. He preferred clients who left him alone, let him manage the bees, and didn’t bother him while he was working. Those who were omnipresent or just too chatty would find, the following year, he sadly could not fit them into his schedule.

  He just liked working with the bees, and did not want to spend hours every day talking to people. His hearing is poor. “They are all very nice and interested, but I cannot hear them half of the time, and all I can think about is how many more hives I need to check before it gets dark,” he would say to me. All of his clients were from word of mouth. Included in his route were the well heeled—the homes of George Soros, the Rockefellers, and other prominent families with enough land on their estates that he could easily go for years without seeing anyone other than his fellow hired hands as he drove in and out of their guarded properties to tend to the beehives.

  While Martha did chat with Norm from time to time, he really did like her, and so of course he continued to keep her on. She left Westport, Connecticut, behind and moved to a gorgeous piece of land in Katonah, New York, located in Westchester County. I often accompanied my dad to the estate. Once we passed the ever-present armed guards, we often first checked in and visited the ornate stables—much larger and better built than our own houses—where a team of impressive breeds were looked after by a crack team of Nepali horse trainers. The stable floors were heated, the lightbulbs, even high up, were dusted and wiped daily. It was a two-tiered, magnificent place. The fence that surrounded the paddock was made from petrified wood and had been brought down in pieces from a ranch in Canada. These were some high-living horses.

  My father’s favorite part of the exquisite property was the garden—and he rarely failed to wander past it without grabbing a tomato or something to munch on. “They taste better when you steal ’em,” he told me with a smile, juice dripping down his chin. And
then we would tend to the bees.

  There were four beehives that Martha wanted painted “Katonah colors,” which meant her paint brand at the time. No problem, since they really were lovely colors. We could never fault Martha for style. When my father appeared on her show many moons ago, each small silver spoon used to gently ladle small amounts of honey was worth several thousand dollars. Martha didn’t mess around. She had a separate washer and dryer for towels that were used exclusively for her cats. We are all aware that Martha has peculiarities or eccentricities. But these are hard earned. She built an empire out of arranging flowers and baking pies. I have always admired her. Even after she fired my father.

  Actually Martha fired my father three times, but it only stuck once (the last time). They had a funny relationship. The two of them exchanged hundreds of emails via a secret email address—or at least a non-public one—that Martha uses to communicate with people directly. Martha was very candid with Norm. He enjoyed their exchanges and friendship, even though sometimes he grumbled. He never cared about her fame and fortune. Even after it was clear that Martha was becoming a worldwide icon, to him she was just a woman he’d met at the gym in Connecticut a couple of decades prior. He started taking care of her bees when she learned that was what he did, after she’d spotted his smoker, the Tin-Man’s-head-looking device in the back of his little pickup truck, still smoldering. They became almost chummy. He attended a 1950s-themed party at her house, where my mother dressed in a poodle skirt and my dad wore jeans, a white T-shirt, a leather jacket, and generous amounts of Brylcreem in his hair. In a quaint way, he and Martha were pals.