Honey and Venom

by Andrew Coté

  Jon texted me right away when he spied a swarm nestled on the limb of a tree on West Seventy-second Street one June afternoon. I was not too far away with my beekeeping friend Molly Conley, an Iowan transplant to New York, when I got Jon’s message. The swarm was a bit high up for me to grab without my truck and ladder, but as I had a good parking spot, which is worth quite a bit to New Yorkers with vehicles, I didn’t at that moment want to move the truck and lose my precious parking space just for the sake of three or four pounds of bees. Plus it gave me an excuse to phone my friend Tony and let him get one of his much-coveted overtime gigs, which was something I often assisted him in getting, at his insistent requests. So I called Tony, and we waited. And waited. Since Tony’s overtime clock started when he started driving, he was not always in a hurry to reach his destination. Eventually he arrived, and though the swarm was benign and mostly out of public view, Tony had alerted the Twentieth Precinct to its presence. Only he must have presented it to them with as much hysteria as if a terrified toddler had been spotted dangling from the limb of that tree. I counted fifteen officers at one point and at least half a dozen vehicles. This was unusual, and there was no need for all of the backup. Two of the officers initially tried to hustle us away from the bees, until they spotted our beekeeping regalia and we were accepted as part of the operation.

  Tony had also played his usual card and made some other calls—to the press. It was no accident that by the time he arrived in his vehicle there was a small swarm of reporters on the ground as close as they could get to the swarm in the tree. Still, there were not enough there to satisfy the Greek. Tony chatted with me, Molly, and Jon as we stood on the sidewalk waiting for him to begin the magic show.

  “What are you waiting for?” I asked, grinning, knowing the answer. We all knew.

  “Just a few more minutes.” He smiled like a Cheshire Cat and winked. Tony was wearing a T-shirt that he had specially made that had his Hotmail email address across the front so people could contact him. “It shows up in the photos!” Tony told us, tapping his finger to his own head and smirking, letting us know he had thought of everything.

  About forty-five minutes after his arrival, the size of the press pool seemed to meet Tony’s satisfaction, and he ascended the short distance from the ground to the thin branch in a bucket truck.

  Generally when I get wind of a swarm, I want to catch it myself. There is simply nothing about beekeeping that I enjoy more than capturing swarms. Particularly easy-to-grab swarms such as this one, which was drooping in one mass from the branch, not too high, easy to dislodge and carry off to a hive under bluer skies. Also, it is best to grab a swarm as quickly as possible. While they hang there, hundreds of scouts are out and about seeking a new home, and at any instant the swarm could come to a collective decision to depart. They might alight to a higher branch or move half a mile away. There’s no telling. So securing them as quickly as possible is important.

  Molly, Jon, and I stood on the sidewalk and cracked jokes to one another as we watched Tony in action. The show—or showboating—commenced. First Tony, who wasn’t yet wearing a veil or gloves, leaned in to the swarm. He waited a moment to make sure that all of the many photographers were poised. Then he made his signature move of slowly plunging his bare hand into the thick of the swarm, an action that always produced a cacophony of oohs and aahs from the uninitiated, and some dramatic photos to boot. At this point his facial expression was stern and determined, as if he were trying hard to either void or retain his bowels.

  Tony routinely claimed to neophytes that the immersion of his hand into the swarm got the bees used to his scent so that he could better capture them without incident. For the beekeepers watching, the giggle factor gets pretty high when hearing this explanation, but it’s all supposed to be fun, so we don’t spoil the entertainment. Capturing swarms is, after all, a simple procedure, so why ruin the spectacle with a few facts?

  There have been more swarms than I could ever recall in New York City. There are dozens every year. But to actually see a swarm in flight is a rare and awe-inspiring thing. Rudolf Steiner said, “If you now look at a swarm of bees, it is, to be sure, visible, but it really looks like the soul of a human being, a soul that is forced to leave its body.” And the Austrian esotericist was right. What he didn’t mention is that it can be as loud as a buzz saw, and the bees may spread out over several cubic meters of airborne space. As for capturing settled swarms, one rare day Detective Dan Higgins and I captured five in five hours—our personal record while working together.

  Years ago, I had a call about a swarm in the East Village. The bees had departed from a hive kept atop a walk-up building on East Ninth Street. I alerted a few other beekeepers, and we all headed to the spot. Then I got a follow-up call that the swarm had moved on. I asked the beekeeper to look carefully, in case the swarm had simply moved to a higher branch or another nearby tree. No dice. It was a warm day and perhaps the scout bees had found a suitable domicile elsewhere. C’est la vie.

  Still, I was already en route, so I continued to the scene anyway. Sure enough, the swarm was there, just higher up in the tree, now about twenty-five feet from the ground. When I arrived, I realized that the person who’d called me had been in one of my beekeeping courses. This woman had not inspected her hive even once that year, and the swarm was, naturally, from her own rooftop hive. But it was too high to be reached by the ladders that we had available.

  NYCBA member Paulo Anjou, a native of Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky, and recently anointed beekeeper, showed up that day on East Ninth Street to offer his help. So did beekeeper Ezra Hug, whose love for honey bees extended to giving his daughter the middle name Bee. Our biggest problem that afternoon was that we could not reach the swarm. Normal people would have left it alone and gone home. We hatched a scheme to stop a truck, offer them some money to park under the swarm, bring a ladder atop the truck, and try to reach the swarm that way. Soon we had flagged down a Heineken truck and perched a ladder on its roof. Passersby gawked. We clambered onto the truck. Even with the ladder bringing us to greater heights, the swarm was out of reach, though the branch on which it dangled could be gripped. A few minutes passed while I evaluated the options. More passersby stopped and pulled out phones to snap photos. Two people in bee veils on a big green Heineken truck. “Even in the edgy East Village, this was an unusual sight,” recalled Vivian Wang, another newly consecrated beekeeper witness to the melee.

  Paulo and I perched on the roof of the tall truck. Paulo held the ladder; Vivian held her breath. I scaled the ladder, stood atop the uppermost point of it, and shook the branch hard to dislodge the bees. The swarm plopped right into the bucket I was holding. Well, most of it did. Spectators hollered, “There’s bees all over you!” Shaking the branch one more time to get the remaining bees that had regrouped, I tuned out the yells, unperturbed by the hat and cape of winged creatures I was wearing. Part of the job of working bees in New York is dealing with the public. Many on the street fancies him- or herself an instant expert, and offers unsolicited advice about—or, more often, criticism of—whatever tactic they might see the beekeeper employing. One has to become immune to their voices and tune them out, especially when working up high and risking safety. Even though some voices included well-intended advice, I needed to keep my focus on the task at hand.

  I climbed back down onto the roof of the truck. Paulo and I brushed my cloak of bees into the container as best we could, and then we both climbed down from the vehicle. At first we tried to shake hands with the Heineken truck drivers, but seeing the cloud of bees around us they demurred, smiled, and drove off. There were still bees all over Paulo and me. A few landed on the crotch of a passerby’s pants, which I decided not to point out, thinking there would be an unhappy ending were he to panic and swat at them. It was not the cleanest swarm capture we had ever made, but we had the majority of the colony safely in our screened bucket. Appropriately, we celebra
ted with Heinekens, but we had to buy them from a nearby bodega since the truck had already sped far away from the haze of bees that had blanketed it.

  We find out about swarms in a variety of ways. Some swarms we grab on our own when we’re informed directly via our Swarm Hotline on the NYCBA website. Sometimes the call comes from someone at the police department, like Detective Dan Higgins, who took over bee duties for the NYPD after Tony retired. Dan and I had met several years prior at one of the farmers’ markets and talked bees. Then he dropped out of sight for a while to successfully battle cancer. He returned to the force a bit skinnier and with a new zest for life—and for bees.

  I started working with Dan the second Sunday in June on the day of the National Puerto Rican Day Parade. One of the largest parades in the city, it draws over two million people to its gyrating route up Fifth Avenue from Forty-fourth Street to Eighty-sixth Street. The parade has a well-earned reputation for rowdiness. Naturally, a swarm of bees would be disruptive to the already raucous proceedings and incite further mayhem. Or maybe liven things up. But we couldn’t take any chances.

  For the second time in two years, a considerable-sized swarm of bees had landed on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, this one on a pedestrian traffic signal just in front of a Louis Vuitton store, and just a few steps from Trump Tower. The bees were poised there, tens of thousands strong, silently obeying the bright red illuminated hand and its message to STOP. Apparently this intersection was prime real estate for swarms. The one the year before had been catercorner to this in front of the BVLGARI shop, and Tony and I had grabbed it while standing on top of an NYPD Emergency Services vehicle. Clearly the bees have high-end shopping on their minds with these four corners housing BVLGARI, Louis Vuitton, Bergdorf Goodman, and Tiffany & Co.

  There have been so many interesting swarms in so many odd places in New York City they could perhaps fill a book on their own. Swarms have materialized on the deck of the mighty USS Intrepid—twenty thousand fliers attacked the decommissioned vessel one late summer morning; on the umbrella of a hot dog vendor in Times Square; on a United States Postal Service mailbox downtown (air mail?); on the underside of the Brooklyn Bridge; on a streetlight forty feet above the street in Chinatown (perhaps looking to buy knockoff Louis Vuitton bags, jealous of their uptown swarming sisters, Yuliana suggested); on the statue of a lion in front of a house in Queens. And lest one believe swarms are limited to intimidating the population of New York City, think again. Swarms of bees have grounded planes at several major commercial and even military airports. Swarms have interrupted baseball games in San Diego and New York. A swarm of honey bees even attended Muhammad Ali’s funeral, perhaps to say goodbye to he who claimed to “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” A swarm of bees in Gurgaon, India, caused enough mayhem at a local police precinct that a detainee was able to escape. One swarm even landed on a man in England—on his head and face—and left him helpless for quite some time until they decided his head was not quite empty enough to make for a good nest, and so they flittered off again. But one swarm I will never forget was atop an empty building on a roof that is used only once per year, but is one of the most-viewed roofs in the world.

  Starting in 1903, the building now known as One Times Square was built right in the center of Times Square, back when that little plot of land was still called Longacre Square. Despite the shift in names from one square to another, the area isn’t and never was a square. It is more of a bow tie shape, consisting of two big triangles, not one square. Whatever the configuration of the streets, the building presently at the center of it all is named for its first owner, The New York Times. When she was still a relatively young thing of 52 (she is now pushing 170), the Gray Lady was churning out copy right there in midtown Manhattan.

  The Times building went on to serve multiple purposes for the next century plus. Almost from the start, it used its position to monetize advertising space. In 1904, the first electronic signage went up on the sides of the building. Soon the signs became works of art, and people would come just to view them. By 1917, Camel cigarettes had installed a long-standing advertisement of a sailor puffing away on a cigarette, with a hole for his mouth that spewed steam, replicating smoke. Wrigley’s chewing gum, Studebaker Wagons, and, famously, Coca-Cola, have all advertised on the sides of One Times Square.

  At some point in the 1990s it was decided that advertising along the sides of the building would simultaneously generate more income than renting out the space inside and eliminate the problems inherent with tenants. Thus one day, other than a retail space on the ground floor, all tenancy ceased and the shell of the building was dedicated strictly to bright, flashing advertisements to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year for the owners.

  The single most recognized aspect of this huge flashing billboard-of-a-building is the top of it: Since 1907, every year save a couple during the blackouts of the Second World War, the great ball drop has been a part of ringing in the new year in New York City and, courtesy of television and live streaming, just about the entire world. At present, the nearly three thousand Waterford Crystal triangles that make up the ball, lighted by more than thirty thousand LEDs, hang far above heads atop One Times Square twelve months a year. The ball makes its illuminated sixty-second descent just the one time annually. And it was on the very top of that building that we were called to deal with a massive swarm of bees one June day in 2017.

  Hannah Sng Baek and Gus Lodise were with me working some rooftop beehives down on Warren Street in Tribeca when I got a text about a swarm around Times Square. There had been a few in that area, and though it was swarm season and I loved capturing swarms, I had work to do, checking my own hives for swarm cells and production. I also had an appointment with a German journalist at a coffee shop and did not want to break the appointment based purely on the speculation of a swarm “in the area.” So we as a trio walked a block to meet the reporter for the German magazine, but I was distracted by another notification about this swarm.

  “We shouldn’t bother,” Hannah said. Usually she would have been right about an unverified swarm. We did not have all of the correct equipment with us. The traffic and parking would be next to impossible. The person who notified me had not provided a photo, which generally I require before setting off to a supposed swarm because people tend to exaggerate or just get it wrong. But there was an urgency to this alert, and there were multiple messages. So I made a phone call and asked the questions that I ask, which are phrased to garner responses that guide me in verifying whether we are dealing with a swarm of honey bees or with some other issue, like a nest of wasps, or a few wayward bees attracted to a melted Popsicle puddle. Disconnecting the call I said, “Let’s check it out.” And off we went.

  Hannah first approached my stand at Union Square in November of her freshman year at New York University, having read about me in a book by Robin Shulman entitled Eat the City. It was assigned to all NYU freshmen for some years, during which I had a steady stream of smiling young college students stopping by the Union Square Greenmarket asking “Are you Andrew?”

  Hannah soon demonstrated herself to be an asset to my little operation. She had been interested in honey bees since she was seven. At that time, she made a poster about bees and planned to be a beekeeper when she grew up. So reading that book and then meeting me was, in her own words, “like meeting my hero!” With that kind of ego stroking, how could I not keep her around? Hannah has now worked with me for years, at the market and on rooftop beehives. I know her parents and sister, I attended her college graduation, and she has visited and spent time with my Japanese “family” in Kyoto. On her own, she has gone off to work bees in the south of France; in central Russia an hour outside of Ufa, in an ethnically Turkish Muslim region; and has reared queens in Finland at the country’s largest apiary with five hundred beehives. So she is a worker bee dedicated to the craft. And she is not afraid of hei
ghts, which on that day was a distinct plus.

  I decided to leave my pickup truck downtown and risk a ticket. One uptown subway ride later, Hannah, Gus, and I emerged in the thick of Times Square. We were surrounded by people dressed as superheroes, people in red hats and vests trying to sell us bus tours, and multitudes of tourists. We were told originally that the swarm of bees was terrorizing a police substation at ground level, but they had left that site much earlier. The information I now had was that the swarm had taken hold up on the roof near where the New Year’s ball dropped. We entered One Times Square to speak with the property manager.

  We were wearing our beekeeping gear, since we were beekeepers beekeeping, and as a trio we appeared to be perhaps hazmat workers or extras from Silkwood. This appearance helps a great deal when trying to gain access to a security-intense building or otherwise hard-to-enter area; seeing someone all garbed like that lends a sense of urgency to the situation at hand and generally speeds up access. Gus was fifteen years old, the son of friends, and I did not want his youth to slow us down, should the management deem him too much a liability, so I told him to put the veil over his face to hide his juvenescence. Gus was spending a week helping me at farmers’ markets and in other beekeeping work like digging holes and bottling honey. Or, put another way, he was learning about the hard slog that is real beekeeping. It was a great arrangement for me. I found myself liking him tremendously—he was smart, polite, not too talkative—and since I was also fond of his parents, I decided I needed to return him intact. I made a mental note not to allow him too close to the edge of the roof.