Honey and Venom

by Andrew Coté

  I probably need not mention that things usually start to go wrong after such a remark.

  We arrived at the gas station. For reasons unclear, the owner did not want to sell us gas. It was not because we had jumped the half-mile-long line—all military and paramilitary vehicles do that. I never learned the exact reason why, but he did not want to sell to us, and he said so plainly. Dave was angry. We needed gas, and we needed to get on the road to get past Mosul and get home before dark. Dave threatened to shut the gas station down, to set up his vehicles at either entrance and make sure the owner got no business whatsoever. The clock was ticking, and still the owner would not budge. Tempers flared and the driver of my vehicle got out and started shouting at someone. We had a mix of Kurds and Arabs and Americans, and no one seemed to fully trust, and certainly did not like, the others. It was becoming very tense, but ultimately we were served, we paid, and we left.

  Tensions continued to run high, however, and Dave reminded the drivers to go easy on the drive home. Then, naturally, two of our vehicles collided right outside of Mosul—one apparently had been following the other too closely. We eventually made it back to base, but it was not a great ending to what was mostly a long, unproductive day.

  We arrived at our compound just as it was getting dark. We were muddy beneath our clothes, as the lake had been surrounded by deep, soft mud that squished between our toes. We were all hot and tired. I was also hungry, so I went to the kitchen, where I found the cook cleaning up. She was a woman from Baghdad, an Arab, not a Kurd or Assyrian like most of the people I had encountered in Erbil. I had a hankering for couscous. I’d had couscous with every meal in Dohuk, and I had seen some there in the kitchen before. But when I asked for it, she looked taken aback. I kept repeating “couscous,” and saying how good it was and how much I wanted it. I may even have rubbed my stomach and made an “mmm, mmm” noise, which to my mind was an international sound and gesture for “Good eatin’!” She left, upset.

  A short while later I discovered that outside of the United States and the Maghreb in North Africa, “couscous,” or at least, “cous,” in Arabic refers to the female genitalia.

  No wonder I didn’t get any, asking the way I did. I showered, went to my quarters, wrote my report, and went to sleep.

  I’m always in favor of helping others through the vehicle of the miraculous honey bee, particularly in difficult areas during hard times. It was a tough trip, though. I discovered no healing waters in Iraq, in spite of the perfection of our swim behind the Dohuk Dam.

  The time I spent in Iraq was mercifully conflict free for me, compared to the experiences of many others during the same general time frame. I was able to meet and hang out with some excellent people. My friend Marwan, thank G-d, avoided some of the worst atrocities committed against the Yazidi and is now living in Sweden, with family just one town over. Dave now lives in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and has added “grandfather” to his list of job titles. One of my former Assyrian interpreters and her family are in Chicago and have recently welcomed a new baby to their family. One of the Iraqi beekeepers who was also a dermatologist went on to take over the century-old apiaries of the late Brother Adam at Buckfast Abbey in Devon, England. And so, for the fortunate, life continues, in ways and directions that none of us could have expected.

  * * *

  —

  Aside from being used as tools of war, honey bees have been used for healing the wounds of combat as well. In fact, anyone who suffers from a stressful job or situation may benefit from working with honey bees. The experience of opening the hive, smelling the heavenly scent of the freshly made honey stuffed into immaculate beeswax, and hearing the steady hum of thousands of workers striving toward a common goal is soothing and therapeutic. Since the return of soldiers from the Western Front following the Great War, beekeeping has helped people find a semblance of peace and continuity after horrific experiences.

  The Federal Board for Vocational Education, whose sole mission was to assist disabled soldiers, sailors, and marines in finding work, put out an “Opportunity Monograph” in 1919, the thirty-seventh in a series, this one specifically to promote beekeeping for injured and maimed servicemen. It urged them to “make beekeeping [their] life work,” enticing them with “Uncle Sam foots the bill” for most or all expenses associated with their training. The text reads, in part, “Training counts. You know it counts, for it was training that helped you beat the Hun.”

  The driving force for this particular program was to help physically disabled veterans to gain a means of income generation. The monograph illustrates two World War I veterans—Mr. Nicholls, who lost both his legs, and Mr. Donnegan, who came home missing one arm—who returned to the United States and in time took up beekeeping as their vocations. “It is especially attractive…to those who have…lost one or more limbs….A beekeeper should, however, have one good hand and arm.” (It noted, in the margins, “If you need a new arm or leg, that will be provided, one for Sundays and one for the workshop. You can play the game with it as well as with the one you left over there, and it won’t hurt when you pound your thumb or get it broken…and it is warranted against rheumatism.”)

  Though this pamphlet did not address the mental wounds and anguish these servicemen experienced, there must have been something to having honey bees act as agents of positive change, because when World War II ended, there was another Veterans Administration–approved program to assist returning disabled veterans to learn beekeeping. This was more of a general farming program, aimed at those men who had been blinded. The headline of a 1947 article in The Baltimore Sun reads THEY MILK INVISIBLE COWS. At Barnes Farm School for the Blind in Henniker, New Hampshire, the veterans were “taught enough planting, animal husbandry, beekeeping, poultry handling and other farm tasks to qualify as competent farm workers.” A blinded former GI and city boy named Joe Lysak spent two years learning how to be a farmer, rather than live off the total disability payments he could easily have taken from the government. He concluded that his example “should knock into a cocked hat that sarcastic old saying about ‘the blind leading the blind.’ ” And the notion of a blind person tending honey bee colonies is not new or far-fetched. François Huber (1750–1831) was a Swiss entomologist who lost his vision as a teenager. He is renowned for his breakthrough work with honey bees, all of which was entirely based on observations spoken to him through his wife, servant, and many assistants.

  Today there are still programs that use bees and beekeeping to help those with post-traumatic stress disorder find an equilibrium that has evaded them, including Michigan State University’s “Heroes to Hives” program. I could not put it better than former army private first class Adam Ingrao, who said, “When you are working beehives, if you are not thinking about what you are doing—if you are not in that space—you tend to get stung.” Working with bees is a way to leave baggage behind.

  Personally I find it virtually impossible to think of anything other than the honey bees in front of me when I am in the midst of a hive inspection. The organized chaos that is a constant in the hive is wondrous and eliminates all other concerns for that spell of time one is among them. I find working with the bees meditative, reflective, and healing.

  *1 “They gathered up great numbers of wild honeycombs dripping with toxic honey and placed them all along Pompey’s route. The Roman soldiers stopped to enjoy the sweets and immediately lost their senses. Reeling and babbling, the men collapsed with vomiting and diarrhea, and lay on the ground unable to move. The Heptakomites easily wiped out about one thousand of Pompey’s men.” —Adrienne Mayor, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs (Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 2003).

  *2 Billings 1887, from Historical Natural History: Insects and the Civil War by Gary L. Miller

  *3 As if that isn’t enough, from time to time the zookeepers take slabs of honeycomb and leave them scattered in the bear pen as snacks for the b
rown bears. Bears love honey—and honey bees and larva. So the Bronx Zoo bees, directly and indirectly, are filling the bellies of the birds and the bears. But there is more! The best part is the manicure services offered to the bears. Trimming a bear’s nails (claws?) can be a challenge. The folks at the Bronx Zoo fill an oversized baby bottle with honey from which the bear will suckle and slurp out the sweet thick liquid. That bottle is held high up behind a fence, enticing the bear to stand up and place its mitts on the barrier. While said bear is feasting slowly and greedily on the sugary beverage, its paws rest on the fence, nails through the openings, which are trimmed without any trouble at all. If anyone knows of a more adorable way to trim a bear’s claws, please send a note to my publisher and let me know, too.

  AUGUST

  One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees.

  —LEO TOLSTOY

  All through the swarm season of 2012, and even the year before, I received calls about swarms in Corona, a neighborhood in Queens. There seemed to be too many for one area without a central source, but I couldn’t find the root of the problem, and the list of local hives provided by a sympathetic source inside the Department of Health did not reflect any sizable apiaries in the vicinity. It was vexing, but there were plenty of other bee problems and mysteries to solve, honey to harvest and hawk, and rooftops apiaries to cultivate.

  August is what is known as the dearth period. The dearth is when nectar flow for the bees is at a minimum. During the dearth, there are few resources from which the honey bees may draw their food, and so they begin to change their operations a bit. As the year progresses, the queen continues to lay fewer eggs, so that there are fewer mouths to feed the smaller quantity of foodstuff available. The guard detail at the front entrance to the hive is beefed up to deflect the increased number of robbers who might want to make a grab for winter surplus. And as implausible as it may seem to sweating humans, it is during the dearth, when temperatures are at their highest, that bees begin to batten down the hatches and prepare for the long, hard winter. The dearth is also when the bees become most susceptible to pests such as varroa mites, the parasite that leeches on to bees when they are still in their cells in their pupal stage.

  In August 2012, the dearth period led to one of the strangest, messiest urban beekeeping events I’ve ever encountered in all the years that I’ve been keeping bees. It’s a tale of excess, neglect, bee abuse, bait and switch, and karma in action. It’s a story that’s been told far and wide; the scene even earned a mention in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, which would have made me unspeakably proud in my adolescence, and still made me smile decades later.

  On July 23, I received word from a man in Queens named Dr. Dalton Garis regarding some beehives that a client of his realtor wife was keeping at his home in Corona. Garis, then sixty-five years old, had earned his PhD in food and resource economics from the University of Florida. He’d found the New York City Beekeepers Association online and sent this email:

  A friend of ours has extensive beehives now producing honey. He must sell his house and needs to find a new home for the bees. The hives are behind his house….Call me anytime at these numbers below if you have any suggestions.

  I phoned Dr. Garis, and he put on his wife, a member of the ever-expanding Chinese community in that area of Queens. What she lacked in English proficiency, she made up for in volume and speed. She also liked to repeat herself and did not consider it important for a conversation to be a two-way endeavor. It was a painful introduction to the Corona bee project and one I should have seen as a harbinger for what was to come. Sadly I did not.

  Mrs. Garis said, or at least I understood her to say, that she was a realtor and that one of her clients had “four or five” beehives in his backyard, and a lot of honey to sell. This honey part matched what her husband had written via his email. Prior to my call, I wrote to Dr. Garis and let him know that I could not help with the honey (for various reasons, mostly the fact that I had enough honey from my own beehives), but that I could probably assist with relocating the beehives. Dr. Garis replied: “He must sell everything. Price is negotiable. My wife can act as translator.”

  To which I replied: “I am only trying to help—I do not need the bees or the honey—but I can probably find someone. I assume this needs to be done immediately, yes?”

  It did. We agreed on a day and time for me to head to Corona and scope out the situation. A few days later, I arrived at the site with my friend Tom Wilk, who was also a Queens resident, an enthusiastic curler, and a budding beekeeper. Tom, a native of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, had been keeping bees for only about three months, but he had already shown great heart and a strong work ethic. He had helped me move live hives, harvest honey, and capture swarms, and had been the recipient of more stings than I could count, taking them all with only minimal and understandable complaint. As a wholesale wine rep for more than twenty years, Tom also keeps me saturated in fermented delights, so he is a super good fellow to have at the arm.

  I parked my pickup, and Tom and I walked toward the address. We could not have been prepared for what we saw. In this tightly populated neighborhood, on a narrow strip of driveway leading to a two-story brick house, was a rickety mound of active beehives spanning the entire width of the pavement. There were not four or five beehives; there were more like forty-five; I had apparently misunderstood Mrs. Garis. The beehives were in shambles. They were stacked atop one another in teetering piles as many as four colonies high with no fresh water source. Since the boxes faced all four directions rather than one consistent one, many of them faced the neighbors’ doors and windows. The house to one side was a multiple-family residence with doors for different apartments in the front, the side, and the rear of the building. Some people would have had to walk at least forty feet through that horrid scene every time they entered or exited their home during daylight hours. It was a honey-making sweatshop. Even in poverty-stricken places like Nigeria, Cuba, or the mountains of West Virginia, I had never seen an apiary as disorganized as this one. The post-earthquake apiaries in Port-au-Prince were in better shape.

  As it was a warm day, there seemed to be bees exploding in every direction out of the hives, but unlike a real explosion, the momentum of this bursting forth never slowed. The activity was all within a few feet of the public sidewalk and just two steps from neighbors’ windows and walkways. It turned out that multiple complaints had been made to various city authorities, but no one knew what to do about the situation and the conglomerate of complaints never got to the right place. Weeks later at the request of a pleading next-door neighbor who spoke only Spanish, I personally called the local precinct, was treated poorly, placed on hold, and then disconnected. Not that the local precinct would or could have done much.

  The realtor, along with the owner of the house, Yi Gin Chen, then fifty-eight, came out and we all talked about the bees and the honey. “Hello, Mr. Chen,” I said and smiled. “You just call him Chen,” said Mrs. Garis. He took us inside and showed us that he had about thirty pails of honey containing about sixty pounds each. We were given samples of the honey. It tasted exquisite. It had a strong minty essence and was thick and complex. The bees had most probably availed themselves of the nearby Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the fourth largest park in the five boroughs, for the lion’s share of their nectar. It was gorgeous stuff.

  I did not need any of the honey, but I called a friend of mine who runs a family bakery in Queens and told him how great it was. He was interested in reducing his carbon footprint in terms of sweetener, and he loved the idea of using honey from Queens. We struck a deal with Chen. This was a laborious process—there is a reason why, at my honey stand, I have a sign that reads in English, Chinese, and Russian, NO BARGAINING. Those second two language choices are not random but are directed at cultures where bargaining is inherent and expected. But I cannot afford to turn every
simple transaction into a long-winded exchange. Plus I’m not as bargaining-savvy as some and I would likely lose every transaction.

  My friend ended up buying twenty buckets of Chen’s product. It seemed like a great arrangement in that Chen got to unload some of his honey, and the bakery got a source of local sweetener at a reasonable price. So money was counted out and handed over, and buckets were loaded into the back of my truck. I did not personally load the buckets; Chen and his assistant insisted on doing that. The honey was dropped off at the bakery, where their staff unloaded it. And all parties were smiles and handshakes.

  Next was the problem of the beehives. Chen wanted to sell the beehives. “We understand,” we told him. “We’ll help,” we told him. “How much would you like to sell them for?” This is when things got more difficult. He did not want to say what he wanted to sell them for. He did not want to give out his telephone number or address to anyone, or for me to share it. He wanted to be offered a price for them and negotiate from there, but he wanted all arrangements to go through me or the NYCBA. I explained that the best I could do would be to post an ad on our social media accounts to alert people to the hives for sale. I warned him that finding an urban buyer who had the knowledge and means to safely secure and move about fifty beehives would be nearly impossible.