Honey and Venom

by Andrew Coté

  Needless to say, though I enjoyed the spot, no one noticed me, and luckily I had just enough dignity not to start pointing it out to people. I paid for my drink and left, not feeling too disappointed, but a twinge silly.

  But before that, after seemingly never-ending back-and-forth changes with the Cake Boss crew, we worked out all of the arrangements and finally came up with a date and time to do the rooftop shoot. I showed up at the now defunct Bridge Cafe in the Financial District of lower Manhattan on the corner of Water and Dover streets. Well known as a former haven for pirates, the Bridge Cafe, according to owner Adam Weprin, was the oldest continuously open pub in New York City, as well as being New York City’s oldest commercial wood-frame building, dating from 1794. It was also reported to be haunted by the ghosts of prostitutes who had worked upstairs. These ghosts of ill repute supposedly trailed lavender scents behind them as they made their otherworldly rounds in the rickety old haunt. I never encountered them.

  On the day we were to film the scene with the Cake Boss at the restaurant, I met Mickey, who was there ahead of schedule and smiling fit to burst, and together we ascended the dark, creaky centuries-old staircase. It was then that we discovered the place hadn’t been renovated in who knows how long. The second and third floors were completely without electricity and nowhere near up to code. The owner used the space as a huge warehouse for old paperwork, and also apparently as a safe house for wayward pigeons, as some of the windows were permanently open and pigeon excrement heavily decorated boxes that bore handwritten masking-taped labels that went back four decades.

  Though he showed up on time, Buddy the Baker spent about ninety minutes talking on his phone before we could start the filming. When no one seemed to be able or even willing to try to tell him to get off, I started to envision how the rest of the day might go. Still, nothing could have prepared me for what I was to encounter. Buddy was the least of my concerns when I turned to see Mickey, standing just behind one of the beehives, as naked as the day he was born. Nude beekeeping would “set me apart,” he later claimed, and “give me more exposure.” No doubt both things were true; there was indeed a great deal of pale exposure. I feared for the white balance on the cameras.

  While I stood gaping, utterly speechless, Mickey took the outer cover off the far hive and stood on it to make himself taller for the camera. “A little trick I learned,” he said proudly, not at all addressing the elephant—or inchworm—on the roof. Mortified, I braced for a shutdown of production.

  Somehow the filming went on, with three fully dressed men and one fellow unencumbered by the trappings of fashion, checking the inside of the beehive. To me at least, no one on the production team said a word about the naked beekeeper, nor did Buddy. After a number of takes, we wrapped that scene. The “talent,” as the star of the show is called, immediately left, the equipment was packed, and the crew of about eight descended to the cobblestone street below. The crew, Mickey—mercifully dressed once again—and I then headed for a community garden where I was also keeping beehives, Green Oasis, on Eighth Street between avenues C and D. This was in what was once referred to as Alphabet City and is now mostly known as the East Village. When the show was aired, the viewing audience would be told that the scene in Green Oasis was taking place a few days later, during a gathering of New York City beekeepers who were waiting for the cake that Buddy and his crew were to deliver to the garden. The occasion was intended to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the legalization of honey bee keeping in New York City. There were several dozen people milling about, happy and genuinely excited to be on the show and to see what the ingenious bakers had fabricated.

  The inedible prop cake appeared, and it looked like something out of a Winnie-the-Pooh nightmare. Thanks to editing magic, after that “cake” was cut on camera, we were served a different cake, a sheet cake that tasted more or less like every other sheet cake in the world.

  A few months later, when the show was set to air, Mickey was a ball of nervous excitement. To witness his television debut, he invited a group of people to a bar in Brooklyn where he had arranged for the television to be tuned to TLC to watch his glory on a huge screen. I wasn’t there (I may have been too traumatized from my own experiences at a bar seeing myself on television), so I don’t know exactly how many people showed up, though he told me he’d invited everyone he knew and then some. I had a few mutual friends there, so I did not have to imagine the scene—the crowd waiting in anticipation, Mickey breathless and squirming, his wife squeezing his arm in excitement. Drinks flowing. When the program came on, cheering from the crowd began. Mickey smiled and stared at the screen so as not to miss an inch (the inch?) of his debut. The show ran for its full twenty-two minutes plus commercials with every bit of Mickey edited out except for one half second during which he could be spotted stuffing his wide-open mouth with replacement sheet cake in the background at the community garden.

  I don’t see much of Mickey anymore. Certainly not as much as I saw that day. I learned that sometime later, Mickey had been handcuffed and taken to the Seventy-ninth Precinct station house in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where he’d been tossed into a cell. He ended up being issued two summonses—one for disorderly conduct, and one for violating article 161.03a of the New York City health code, which declares that “a person who owns, possesses or controls a dog, cat or other animal shall not permit the animal to commit a nuisance on a sidewalk of any public place.” In this case, it was “other animal.” Namely, bees.

  Tony Bees, the go-to cop for beekeeping issues at the time, had been called to Madison Street in Brooklyn to deal with tens of thousands of bees that had escaped from a parked car, which turned out to be Mickey’s. Ironically, Mickey was teaching a beekeeping safety course at the time of his arrest. On a sweltering hot day, he had chosen to leave boxes of poorly contained colonies of bees to roast in the stifling heat inside his car, with the windows barely cracked. Some of the plastic packaging melted just enough to make escape possible, and thousands of the bees hovered around the spot, creating an unsafe condition in the area surrounding the car and along the sidewalk.

  Joining half a dozen uniformed police officers summoned to the scene, Tony called me once he was there, as Mickey had dropped my name in an attempt to mitigate his circumstances.

  “Andrew and I are good friends,” Mickey told Tony, smiling his most winning smile. Tony called and asked me if that were the case.

  “I know him. I’m not quite sure I would want to post bail for him or anything like that,” I responded honestly, not knowing the details of the situation.

  “What should I do with him?” Tony asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want I should arrest him?” Tony briefly explained the carelessness with the bees, the distress of the neighbors, the whole ugly scene. It was bad for the bees, and worse for New York City beekeeping’s recently hard-won legalized position. I could not defend what Mickey was doing.

  “I wouldn’t hold it against you. It’s your call.”

  “Got it.”

  Phone clicks, followed shortly thereafter by handcuffs clicking.

  Mickey’s claim to fame had gone from an instant of chowing down mediocre cake on television to being the first beekeeper arrested for beekeeping-related activity in the history of New York City. In the end, he was proud to see his name in The New York Times when it reported the fiasco, and he shared the story far and wide. They say there is no bad publicity, and for him, it seemed to be true. Unrelated to all that, he has taken his wife and three daughters and moved to New Jersey, so we don’t see too much of him anymore. He still keeps bees, from what I gather, and is still trying to perfect his bee dance.

  * For detailed information about swarms, refer to Thomas D. Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  MAY

  There is no doubt that a certain similarity can be
seen between bees, which sculpt the honeycombs out of a soft substance (wax), and sculptors, who do as much with the same material (or equivalents)….Is it therefore so surprising that, in this context, the artist should be associated with the self-sacrificial bee?

  —JUAN ANTONIO RAMÍREZ, The Beehive Metaphor: From Gaudí to Le Corbusier

  Hallie Tew, born Hallie Gustavson, was a dog walker, cat sitter, and bee enthusiast based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She grew up in Wisconsin, where she met her future husband, Alex,* a painter (canvas, not walls), and married him, grasping a head of broccoli in lieu of a bouquet of flowers as she walked down the aisle at their wedding. Hallie and Alex moved to Brooklyn around the start of the new millenium, and began their joint lives. Then she worked in an office in Manhattan and was very stylish, often dressing in her grandmother’s vintage outfits. From her bathroom window she watched the Twin Towers burn and fall. Alex, tall, bald, and bearded, is a modish dresser whose studio is also located in Greenpoint. In the early 2000s they were, by all accounts and appearances, a typical young couple from America’s Dairyland living the big-city dream along with their cats in their narrow ground-floor Brooklyn apartment.

  From a young age Hallie had been interested in honey bees, even dressing up as one for Halloween one year in elementary school. One fateful day, as an adult living in New York City, much to her dismay and horror, Hallie learned that she was allergic to honey bees. Not to cats, dust, mold, peanuts, tree pollen, ragweed, or anything else—only honey bees. “Bees make me break out in hives!” she lamented. Her corny joke aside, Hallie was heartbroken. Still, she would not be disabused of her longing to keep bees. She dove headfirst into urban beekeeping despite the dangers.

  Backing up a bit, Hallie and I met at a beekeeping Meetup at a diner called Odessa, on Avenue A right across the street from Tompkins Square Park, where we joined about two dozen others with an interest in the sweet insects. This was during the Bitter Years, when beekeeping was still illegal within city limits. (Not that there was ever a posse sent from the city to crack down on clandestine beekeeping.)

  The get-together was arranged via a now-defunct online group called Brooklyn Beekeepers Meetup that sought out like-minded individuals who were passionate—or at least curious—about bees. Hallie and I found ourselves seated across from each other. When I left the diner to return to my farmers’ market across the street, she made a point to go there, speak to and befriend me. As a result of a friendship that then went a bit too far, and her husband’s disapproval of another man pollinating his wife, Hallie became the subject of what is arguably her husband’s greatest and most personal work of art: a seven-foot-tall oil on canvas that features Hallie painted lifesize, full height, lying on her back, eyes closed, dead, naked as the day she was born, and covered in and surrounded by honey bees, honey, and honeycomb patterns—entitled Death Portrait of Hallie Tew.

  This isn’t the only time that honey bees and art have collided, though perhaps it is one of the more morbid ones. And despite her death portrait living on display, Hallie, thankfully, is alive and well and still beekeeping. When confronted by her husband, she confessed our sticky liaison to him. He was displeased. He took the small figurine that had once adorned the top of their wedding cake—the two of them as bride and groom, replete with her gripping the head of broccoli—and smashed it. But, she being his muse, he also channeled that emotion into what is arguably his greatest, or at least largest, piece of art, now for sale at a reputable downtown gallery for tens of thousands of dollars.

  Here in New York City we aren’t immune to the collaboration of the honey bee and the artist and creative types of all stripes. Even the very landscape of New York City is lightly sprinkled with honey bee acknowledgments and tributes. Skeps—old-fashioned beehives woven like baskets in which honey bees traditionally made their homes prior to the so-called modernization of beekeeping in the 1850s, even though wooden boxes had begun to replace skeps as early as the 1820s in Stockbridge Village, Massachusetts—were often used by banks as symbols of stability and safety. There is a huge stone skep hidden away in one of the side pockets in the Children’s Garden in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; before its home in the garden, this particular skep, made in the 1890s, was an architectural detail on the Brooklyn Savings Bank at the Pierrepont Street entrance. When the building was demolished in the early 1960s, the “historic granite emblem” was transferred to the BBG “in a light snowstorm on February 10, 1964,” and hasn’t budged since. Another skep, this one metal, still adorns a grand old former bank on the northwest corner of Fourteenth Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan.

  In a more modern example, there is a historic subway station in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where an artist commissioned by the city in 2012 created seven-foot gates of honeycomb crawling with brass honey bees. Since then, no one seems to have remembered or bothered to polish them (perhaps that is part of the plan). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which uses the skep as one of their symbols, has honey bees emblazed in stone on the sidewalk outside of their house of worship on the Upper West Side on Sixty-fifth Street and Columbus, and three-dimensional honey bees carved on the wood paneling of the elevators in that building. Mormons are big fans of the honey bee, and believe that “it is a significant representation of the industry, harmony, order and frugality of the people, and of the sweet results of their toil, union and intelligent cooperation.” It’s no surprise, then, that Utah, founded by Mormons, adopted the honey bee as the official state insect.

  The Broadway-Lafayette subway station in downtown Manhattan has neon honeycomb buzzing on display overhead as one uses the stairs to get to or from the trains. David Bowie would have seen these when taking the D or F train to his multi-level penthouse above the Mulberry Street branch of the New York Public Library, from which he could have easily looked across the street and down into the cemetery and seen my seven beehives—one for each of the seven deadly sins—in the cemetery of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, which began interring the Catholic faithful in 1785.

  This gorgeous old church, the only designated basilica in New York City, was the seat of the Archdiocese of New York until 1879, when that designation was transferred to the “new” and better-known St. Patrick’s Cathedral uptown on Fifth Avenue. The grand interior of Old St. Pat’s was used for the baptism scene in The Godfather, and in real life, the FBI used the church as a lookout point to surveil mob bosses in what was then a mafia-saturated portion of Little Italy.

  More interesting to me, though, was the Bowie connection. Like millions of others, I have been enamored of David Bowie’s music and persona since before I was a teenager, and the fact that I was so close to his abode on a weekly basis thrilled me. At least once while working those cemetery hives, I sang Bowie’s “Please, Mr. Gravedigger” at a not-so-quiet volume in the hopes that it would spontaneously draw Bowie’s gaze to my apiary from his magnificent apartment. Alas, and of course, it did not work. But I think I did once hear a window slam shut from somewhere up above.

  There are many more examples of bee references among us. Allusions to them are found in art, advertising, religion, folklore, and mythology. For a beekeeper like me who looks for them—or, maybe, cannot avoid seeing them—the visual references seem downright pervasive, from the hexagonally shaped stones that encompass Central Park and Union Square, to graffiti on various buildings in the outer boroughs and largely unnoticed architectural details on sidewalks, buildings, and walls. And somehow, the humans who make up the complex fabric of this city seem to weave bees into my life in ways that I could not imagine on my own.

  * * *

  —

  Being a somewhat well-known, or at least accessible, beekeeper in New York City, I am approached by all kinds of people who have ideas for projects connected to honey bees. Sometimes they want bees; sometimes they want me. Often it’s a bit of both. Some are legitimate and worthy of attention, like when a car company wants to show
me driving from apiary to apiary, delighted to be behind the wheel of their wonderful Mercedes-Benz Smart Car. (Mercedes-Benz used a white and green electric car for the shoot for the day, “a real missed opportunity not to use a yellow and black one, like a bee!” suggested my good friend Hope.)

  Another time I did a commercial for a Ram vehicle. I did a series of videos for a bank. An ad for a drink sweetened with honey. Once I was hired to wrangle bees for a television commercial for an athlete’s-foot cream, which featured a fairly large pile of live bees atop the feet of a mannequin, later imposed onto the bare feet of a person supposedly suffering from a terrible bout of itchy, painful feet. Twice I took a box of live honey bees to a huge Tribeca photo studio for a shoot related to a cover story for Time magazine about colony collapse disorder, or the disappearance of the bees. Another time, my father, brother, and nephew, Patrick, and I showed up for a Honey Nut Cheerios commercial in which a lone honey bee was to buzz around a single flower. The commercial was shot indoors near huge, bright windows, and it was very difficult to get a honey bee to stay in orbit around just that one flower and not either head on a suicide mission toward the bright lights or toward the windowpane in a vain effort to escape. We tried spraying the flower with sugar water and even putting the bees briefly into the refrigerator to make them less active (not our finest moment, perhaps) until we noted an ASPCA representative on the set and decided against trying that again.