by Andrew Coté
My suspicions had been rising since the beginning. When I asked a simple question like “How long have these beehives been here?” Mrs. Garis and the man would have an exchange that lasted much longer than a translation of my simple question warranted. This happened often. Chen was pleading for help yet seemed wholly unwilling to allow himself to be helped. For the sake of the bees and safe urban beekeeping I wanted to assist; I could not ignore this calamity of an apiary, the welfare of the bees, and the concerns of Chen’s neighbors. But there was only so much that I could do.
Then I got a text from my friend at the bakery. He was displeased. We headed back over there.
Even the delicious smell of freshly baked bread could not assuage the bitterness that sat in wait at the bakery. It seemed that the so-called honey that Chen had sold was nothing like the mouthwatering substance we had sampled. It was extremely thin, sickly sweet, and tasted much more like syrup than anything else. It had a faint whisper of the essence of the original honey in it, but tasted and appeared as if it had been diluted down to something like one part honey and four parts simple syrup. It was an infuriating situation on several levels. First, the gorgeous honey was ruined. Next, even though Chen later denied messing around with the honey, it was clear to me that he was a fraud. He had cheated a local small business owner and made us unwitting accomplices in the swindle. Finally, he had wasted many hours of our time and misled us as well. When we returned and confronted Chen, he played dumb and told us to go away.
So we did. The baker lost out and I’d wasted half a day, but I essentially let it go. Still, the ad that I had placed yielded some results, as a fellow responded that he wanted to purchase the hives. I passed this on to Dr. Garis. A price was arranged, and lo and behold, Dr. Garis contacted me again and asked me if I would prepare the hives to be moved—screen them in, crank-strap them in preparation for their move. Despite my mistrust of Chen, I agreed for two reasons: One, the welfare of the bees was at stake. If this were to be done incorrectly, the bees could die, and/or there could be a massive exodus of bees, which would be bad on multiple levels. Two, Dr. Garis agreed, after a great deal of back-and-forth, that Chen would pay me in cash prior to the work. I no longer trusted the characters involved for obvious reasons and didn’t want to spend my time and efforts for naught.
* * *
—
During this time I was working at my stand at the Rockefeller Center Greenmarket, located between 30 Rockefeller Plaza and the skating rink. It was blistering hot, and there was hardly a breeze. The collection of international flags that surround three sides of the rink were limp in the stagnant afternoon heat. The lunchtime crowd was thinner than usual, thanks to the oppressive heat, but I was still fielding the usual array of questions when Yuliana approached the counter for the first time. She was fair-skinned with straight blond hair, and she wore a brown skirt and a dark blue top. She reminded me of Gwyneth Paltrow, and beauty that she was (and is), I wanted to talk to her. I began by offering her a sample of the honey. I distribute a couple of thousand taster spoons’ worth of honey samples during each twelve-hour market, so that part was reflexive. She didn’t respond to my offer or even acknowledge that she’d heard me. I proffered the spoon again, my arm straight at the elbow, near her eye level. “Would you like to try the whipped honey?” I asked a bit louder. Still she did not glance my way. She was engrossed in the goat milk soaps on my counter. And ignoring me.
“What is it, you think you’re too good for this honey?” I taunted. This caught her attention.
“I wondered who this person was who was so rude to me,” she said later. “So I glanced up and intended to give a look to suggest how dare you even speak to me? But when I did, my glance was met by a pair of beautiful eyes. I remember that they were green. They were devilish and seductive, and accompanied by a smile that instantly melted my heart. I have never wanted to be without him since.”
I have heard this story over many a dinner in response to the question “How did you two meet?” First off, I do not have green eyes. But, honey bees see colors differently from humans. For instance, honey bees cannot see red, but they can see ultraviolet and can detect polarized light. They have five eyes, two of which are compound with thousands of lenses, though the three simple eyes cannot help in detecting intruders. With her comparatively inadequate two eyes, Yuliana seems to see colors differently from other Homo sapiens. I can’t explain why this is, but I have many examples. She argues vehemently about whether something is brown or green, and seems wholly satisfied, apparently, to live in a world with brown grass and green dirt so long as in the end I break down and agree that she is right.
In her native language there is no one word for blue—but one for light blue and one for dark blue. In Japanese, the word for blue and green is the same, at least when discussing traffic lights or seaweed. So perception is skewed no matter what. Also, nothing about our exchange indicated that she experienced the lovestruck rapture she now claims to have been swept away by that first fateful afternoon. At that time she was quite reserved and cautious, and I had no idea that she was “contemplating the best strategy” to move things along while not demonstrating her eagerness to get to know me better. She probably overplayed that card, as she seemed positively disinterested, even bored.
Judging by her soft accent, she had clearly not been born in the United States. I asked her where she grew up. “You haven’t heard of it,” she said, sounding like even uttering these few words were well beneath her. In fact, she addressed her remarks more to the bars of soap than to me.
Unfazed, I retorted, “I’ve probably been there.”
She laughed for the first time. It was genuine but brief. “I doubt it.” This former granddaughter of Lenin would have made her people proud with her now fully resumed Soviet demeanor. Despite the heat she made me wish for a ushanka.*
“Let’s clear this up now. Where is it?”
Silence.
“I can probably guess it.”
Now she looked at me directly. I studied her blue-gray eyes—which actually are blue-gray—and saw them narrow. Something akin to a smile started to form on her face. Then her expression reassembled itself into that blank look that I have since come to know and fear, so well and so much.
“There is no way you can know it,” she insisted, now appearing to be mildly interested in what I had to say.
“If I guess it correctly, you have to give me your telephone number. If I am wrong, I will let you take me out for a drink,” I bargained.
She looked at me confused. “But…” And then she laughed and started to walk away. And stopped again. She appeared to take a deep interest in the bottles of pollen on the counter, picking them up, studying them, and putting them down again. Since it was lunchtime, the busiest hour of the day at the market, there were at least a dozen other people lingering around the stand, but I hardly saw or heard them anymore.
“Excuse me,” one called to me. I held up a finger but kept looking at the intriguing woman in front of me. “Okay. If I guess correctly then you give me your telephone number. If I am wrong I will stop asking.”
“Go ahead,” she said, in what was more like an exhalation.
I stared at her. I thought about her accent. It sounded to me like she’d grown up in the Soviet Union but not Russia. I looked at her features. They seemed to have something Polish in them. I thought about who I usually ran into in Manhattan, where there is no shortage of not only Russian people but immigrants from former Soviet Republics—Belarus, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and so on—who might fit that mold. Then I took a guess.
“L’viv,” I said, careful to use the Ukrainian pronunciation and not the Russian “L’vov.”
Later she told me that when I correctly guessed her home city without any hints at all beyond what I could observe, she thought to herself, “This man is not just a simple farmer.” And to make a long story sh
ort, we now live in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan raising two boys. In the apartment above us live her identical twin sister and her husband, who is also named Andrew, and their two kids. The sisters’ doting mother is there nearly every day and wanders between apartments at will, cleaning, cooking, accessing our apartment with a key that she claims she does not have. Living under these conditions is a peculiar kind of torture.
* * *
—
Back in Queens, with a cash donation to the New York City Beekeepers Association in hand as payment from Chen via Garis—Garis had come in person to the farmers’ market at Union Square to give me the money, and to have me sign a receipt—I took several NYCBA volunteers with me to close up and strap the hives late one Thursday evening in August. Screening in beehives is a job that has to be done at night when the bees are all, or mostly all, inside the hives. We crossed the East River, donned our veils, and descended on the Corona apiary.
When we arrived on the scene at Chen’s house, there was a cluster of reporters and police swarming the house and blocking part of the street while simultaneously keeping their distance from the bees. Word had gotten out that something was happening at the home of the bee hoarder. I spoke to the police captain and let him know that we had been hired by the owner to seal the hives so that the bees could be removed the following morning. The realtor interpreted this and Chen confirmed. We were given permission, with great enthusiasm on behalf of the captain, to go in and take care of business.
Mrs. Garis, the realtor, was wearing a scarf over her head and dark sunglasses, though it was an inky, moonless evening, and seemed to take great displeasure in the attention the property was receiving. The fact that the place was teeming with nearly as many reporters as bees was comical to me. Of course, none of the reporters had bee veils, so they were self-sequestered quite safely away from our activity and the clouds of thousands of confused and increasingly angry bees. Tom Wilk, Duncan Watwood, and a couple of others and I plodded ahead, screening and stapling the hive entrances, wrapping orange crank straps around the hive bodies, and sealing whatever cracks we could find—and there were many in these neglected hives—with duct tape, screens, and staples.
We had brought one fellow with us who had a particularly valuable role to play. A California native, Adam Johnson is an athletic, handsome, blond-haired urban beekeeper, and a former Mormon missionary who is fluent in Mandarin. He was able to position himself near Chen and Mrs. Garis for the express purpose of listening to their conversation so that we might understand what was actually going on.
The bees, for their part, were not cooperating in terms of staying in their hives. They were bearding, a descriptive term for what happens when thousands of bees hang on one another and drip down from the bottom of the hive, like a beard. They do this when it’s very hot inside of the hive and there’s an immediate need to bring down the temperature. It would have been easier to stuff squeezed-out toothpaste back into a tube than to get all of those bees back into their hives, so these displaced bees had no place to go except to fly around, inspect the lights on the police cars, and conduct their own interviews with the local reporters.
We plodded on. My phone kept ringing and texts kept coming, but I could not readily answer or check it with my thick calfskin beekeeping gloves. When I finally got to it, I saw that my friend Tony Bees was en route to the scene, having been contacted by his superiors at NYPD. Of course they’d called him at my prodding, and my call had been made as a result of his prodding me to prod them.
Upon further inspection of the hives, we discovered some definite problems with the bees. The hives were not in the same condition they had been even a week prior. Then, they had been heavy and full of honey, each with two tiers of healthy bees. Now some of the hives, even with two deeps, weighed only forty pounds at best, when they should have weighed 120 pounds at a bare minimum. Some quick inspections revealed what we feared—Chen had, in anticipation of the hives being sold off the next morning, stripped them not only of excess honey, but of all honey. The bees had absolutely nothing to eat, no stores whatsoever, and since it was the dearth period they had no real hope of gathering enough food to carry them until October, let alone until March. Chen had proven himself to be as underhanded about selling the hives as he had been about unloading his diluted honey.
Tony arrived and pleasantries were exchanged in the unpleasant circumstances. It was late and the air was thick with displaced bees, and in spite of the disagreeableness of the whole situation, there was a bit of a carnival atmosphere, what with the huge crowd of neighbors, police officers, and reporters. Tony dug into a few of the hives; he, too, found them to not only be void of stores, but to be diseased. He spoke with the captain of the local precinct on the scene. They agreed that the hives should be removed immediately. This was something I had not anticipated and I was not prepared for it.
Tony would not budge on this issue. He declared the hives confiscated, called in a truck, and at about three A.M., we started loading the fifty or so beehives onto the back of an NYPD vehicle. At this point, I was informed that the buyer, having been apprised of the current state of the colonies, had backed out, so I didn’t feel awful about the confiscation, not that it was my call to make. Chen and his daughters, along with Mrs. Garis, openly expressed their frustration and anger. Adam, silently eavesdropping, was able to fill us in on their machinations and outright lies, so, knowing what I did, I had no sympathy for them.
The crowd soon cleared out, and only Tony and I were left to load the hives. Duncan, Tom, and Adam had, quite sensibly, departed into the night, deservedly so after many, many hours of work screening in the fifty or so beehives. Most of the police had left, too, save for four, sitting in their patrol cars with the windows rolled up and air conditioners blasting. Only a handful of reporters remained. They wanted to see where the bees were going. Tony and I discussed it. Where in New York City could millions of bees be relocated, with no notice, in the middle of a muggy August night? We tossed around the idea of Floyd Bennett Field, an old church parking lot in the Bronx, or even a discreet area in Central Park. The problem was that no one could be reached at that hour to give the okay to any of these locales.
“What about your place in Connecticut?” Tony finally asked as dawn approached.
“What about your place in Rego Park?” I countered.
First of all, my farm is the smallest farm in the Nutmeg State, measuring less than a quarter of an acre. It also has an 1868 farmhouse with no insulation and faulty heating, and a two-car garage so stuffed with beekeeping equipment there is no room for my trucks, van, or forklift. There is even an old yellow school bus that is, hopefully not only in my dreams, one day going to be fully converted into a recreational vehicle. With all of that, not to mention my own considerable number of beehives, I could not imagine where the bees would fit. “What about the driveway? Just for a day or two?” Tony asked. In my state of severe sleep deprivation it made sense to me, so off we went.
Accompanied by a police escort with lights flashing, Tony and I and millions of bees proceeded from Corona, Queens, up Interstate 95 to Norwalk, Connecticut. When we arrived an hour later, we offloaded the bees onto the driveway, and I immediately headed back to New York City in order to reach Rockefeller Center by six A.M. to set up for the market. I watched the sunrise through heavy-lidded eyes and tried desperately to stay awake, nodding off here and there and swerving dangerously. I was so tired that I did not immediately notice that I was headed to the wrong side of the George Washington Bridge and into New Jersey, costing me a half an hour delay as I went back and forth across the Hudson River.
Staying awake was made a little easier by the fact that for almost the entire drive I was listening to the story of the bee confiscation unfold on 1010 WINS radio, one of New York City’s popular all-news stations. In my drained state, it was amusing to hear quotes from Tom, Adam, myself, and others just a fe
w hours after the incident, which was described on air as a “bee bust,” “a sting operation,” and a real “buzzkill,” among other clever turns of phrase.
It was, in a strange way, a fun and satisfying night. All in all, we accomplished a lot. Namely, some NYCBA members gained a ton of experience; for a few of them, it was their first ever beehive-moving endeavor. Next, we were able to provide a public service to the people of Corona, Queens, working in conjunction with New York’s finest to rid a neighborhood of a potentially dangerous situation—unsafe and unfair to neighbors, and hazardous to the health of legal urban beekeeping.
It did not have to play out the way it did, though. Weeks had elapsed between the time we first met Chen and the night we took the hives away. During our initial meeting, we had realized that his bees were not registered. We’d explained to him how to register them, and even supplied him with the paperwork. He told us that he’d started with one beehive, but because of the good weather, they had multiplied to about fifty hives. This was an obvious lie. If true, it would make him the greatest beekeeper in the history of the world, who’d single-handedly solved the problem of colony collapse disorder.
Chen claimed to have been a professional beekeeper back in China. Doubtful but possible. Regardless, he essentially wanted to unload all of his tainted honey; get rid of the bees at a profit after having stripped them of their ability to survive the winter; and sell his house. It later turned out that he harbored six more beehives in the back of his restaurant in Astoria. Well, he initially said it was his restaurant, but then he said he was just a cook there. He changed his story every time he was asked.