Honey and Venom

by Andrew Coté

  There’s a well-known beekeepers’ proverb that dates back to at least the 1600s: “A swarm in May is worth a load of hay; a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon; but a swarm in July is not worth a fly.” My race down the FDR was on one of the last days of August, so a swarm, or in this case, a rescued feral hive, wasn’t worth much. Maybe that’s why in the past four hundred years no one has added a line about August or September to that rhyme. In any case, becoming the caretaker of bees this late in the year meant inheriting a problem. For no good reason, I was trying hard to be bequeathed this particular problem. But I love bees, and I love problem-solving wherever bees are involved, so while I was certainly in it for the welfare of the bees, I was also in it for the fun.

  I drove past Spike Lee’s studio and found a parking spot, climbed out of my Toyota Tundra, and clambered up a small wall to enter the park in Fort Greene, avoiding walking the extra fifty yards to the entrance so I could get to the hubbub as soon as possible. I came upon a group of people crowding the area beneath the tree with the broken limb, using their phones to snap photos of two masses of agitated honey bees. One mass, about half of the colony and probably twenty thousand or so, flew in a frenzied whirlwind in what looked like a dark murmuring cloud in the branches. The other mass was buzzing around the half of the limb that had snapped off and now lay on the ground, its stores of yellowish brown honeycomb clearly visible inside. Poor, confused bees. Their house had ripped in two, and they didn’t know what to make of it.

  Within half an hour, representatives from different beekeeping groups were there, along with unaffiliated beeks and non-beeks alike. I stood uncharacteristically silent, listening to a small group of people bickering over something they had no means to obtain. Some had no veils, no equipment, no experience. Most had no clue. And none of them could reach the bees; this was an academic exercise for them. Yet many of them seemed to feel completely entitled to the remains of the hive that clustered thirty feet overhead. Not to mention that at that point, no one had a clue where the queen was, or if indeed she had survived at all.

  While I was talking with the people on the scene, a beekeeper I didn’t know approached me. Her name was Margot Dorn, and she said that she had seen the colony first and claimed it as hers. She then explained that she’d called another beekeeping group to help rescue it and emphatically, even desperately, repeated that since she had been the first to spot it, the colony was hers.

  More than one beekeeper made his or her case as to how the colony should be rescued. Some ideas weren’t bad, but all lacked the required equipment. Unless some of these beekeepers sprouted a double set of wings quickly, those bees were not going anywhere. I continued to stand back and watch. After some time, realizing that she could not obtain it on her own, Dorn admitted defeat and relinquished the rights to the colony to me. Without protest from anyone or fear of being accused of stealing, I set to work.

  Once Dorn abnegated her claim, I had called Tim O’Neal, who lives in Brooklyn and had assisted me from time to time over the years, and Tony Bees, partly because this was a big enough job that I would need help with equipment and support, and also because this was city property, a public park, and I naturally lacked authority to do anything as extreme as cutting tree limbs. A short spell after the call to Tony, however, Dorn returned and announced a change of heart. She was reclaiming her bees, she asserted, puffing herself up with authority.

  “I wasn’t going to touch the hive before you spoke with me, but at this point, I’ve already made some calls. So we’ll see. If you get to it first, it’s all yours. I won’t try to stop you,” I told her. Her face screwed up like she had eaten something sour, and she turned on her heel and marched away.

  It was true. I wasn’t going to try to stop her. If someone else could reach the bees, fine. At this point I was more interested in watching the beekeepers than in the bees themselves. I settled on a cinder block and observed as more and more beeks piled into the park and stared up, bemused and helpless, at the colony. That colony which, as I’ve said, had very little value. I was reminded about the story of the man who saw an apple atop a tree, claimed it for his own, and would not allow a man with a ladder to take it. The apple rotted and no one got it. Like the apple, the bees would perish now that the nights were getting cold and their home had been split in two.

  “If we had…” “What if we…” “Maybe we could…” Plenty of harebrained hypothetical scenarios were put forth, useful only in terms of their entertainment value. I waited for at least two hours, chatting with Tim and watching the circus before me. Such things I had time for and interest in before having children stole all of my formerly free time.

  A beekeeper whom I will generously call Poindexter Pantstootight had been notified by Dorn, and he arrived at some point. One of his cronies came up to let me know that Poindexter was working on getting sections of plastic PVC pipe to make a long tube attached to a vacuum to suck out the remaining bees from above. I smiled and encouraged him to do whatever he thought was best.

  “Do you think it will work?” he asked.

  “Does it matter what I think?”

  “So you don’t think so?”

  “I know it won’t.”

  “Yes. It. Will!” he proclaimed, widening his eyes, willing the idea to succeed.

  It never got past the talking stage.

  Then Tony showed up, and together we worked out a plan to get a van with a lift bucket to take us up to the bees. Some people on the scene had been talking about scaling the tree and climbing out onto the branch. This was a reckless idea for many reasons. Everyone knew that the branch was weak and hollowed out. Even if it didn’t break under the weight of a person, a fall from that height could mean serious injury or death. No hive is worth a broken spine or fractured skull or the loss of life. Of course, I’ve mentioned that some people, myself included, get the fever when capturing bees and do not always think straight. I will admit to having considered scaling the tree as well, until I remembered gravity.

  The bucket truck idea was better. We pulled out tools from Tony’s pickup and mine—a chainsaw, handsaws, ropes, our veils and gloves, and a hunting sock, which is a sort of big expandable net meant to secure the carcass of an animal like a deer. We established a perimeter with yellow hazard tape. When it was time to commence the real work, Poindexter walked off, not to be seen again that day.

  I got into the bucket and ascended toward the hive, operating the controls for the lift in the bucket. I had never done it before, but it was pretty straightforward, and since I didn’t tip the van over, I suppose I did it right. After a close-up inspection of the branch and colony, and a few photos of it and the scene below, I returned to earth, and Tony and I made a plan. We would cut away the excess branch, cover the colony within the branch with a hunting sock to secure the bees inside, tape that tightly, tie that section of the branch to the lift, then cut the section from the main branch. The log and the bees would then be slowly lowered to the ground, safely removed from the site, and placed into an appropriate home elsewhere to live out their short lives.

  Many of the beekeepers standing by wore their beekeeping veils and suits in a way that reminded me of little kids wearing their Halloween costumes before or after Halloween; they do it just because it’s fun. But at that distance, there was no need for veils. Meanwhile, the hundred-plus civilians—including old ladies, the wheelchair bound, and parents with children in strollers—were just as close to the action and without veils. That was fine, though, because at that point most of the bees were thirty feet above their heads, and the branch (and bees) at ground level had been blocked off with the yellow tape; no one could go near them and the bees were clustered on the broken limb. Still, we did not want a panic with tens of thousands of bees flying into the crowd if something were to go wrong. Like the branch falling, landing on the ground far below, and bursting open like a malevolent piñata.

 
With some simple lumberjack work, Tony and I cut off excess bits of the branch and then secured the hive in a hunting sock to stop the bees from flying hither and yon. Then Tony cut the limb free from the rest of the tree and gently lowered it to ground level. Once it was set on the ground, the beekeepers and other interested individuals clamored around the feral hive and took pictures of the huge, heavy log chock-full of bees.

  Sensing an opportunity to possibly mend a fence that we did not ourselves break, and as a gesture of goodwill and community spirit, Tony and I decided to hand ownership of the bees over to Margot Dorn and her group, hoping it would serve as an olive branch—or at least a vibrating, rotted maple branch—of sorts. It was received by her with a small word of thanks.

  Then, of course, things went wrong. With still a hundred or so civilians watching, Tim O’Neal and the new owners of the bees decided to set to work transferring the comb from the log into a portable hive box. In theory this was exactly the right thing to do, so that the bees would carry their home, food stores, and babies with them. In practice it was completely the wrong time and place to do it. Most unwisely the sock was opened right then and there, undoing our careful packaging and sending furious bees shooting out in all directions like stinging shrapnel. Tim was safely ensconced in the cozy comfort of his veil, his pale fingers nestled safely in thick beekeeping gloves pulled up to the elbows. The many dozens of bystanders were defenseless against the flying stinging ladies whose home had just been torn apart and then chain-sawed and hauled down thirty feet. Tony and I just about lost our cool when we realized that the bees were not sneaking out of the net through some missed egress, but had been purposely let out. We immediately closed it up again. It was unfortunate. Not a single person had been stung during the entire rescue operation; the same cannot be said for its aftermath.

  All in all I was at Fort Greene for six hours, and off and on during that time I was chatting with a young woman named Emily Rueb, who, it came out later in the conversation, was a reporter for The New York Times. The whole silly story of the beehive rescue mission was published in the paper the next day under the headline IN RESCUE OF BEEHIVE EXPOSED BY HIGH WINDS, HONEY AND RANCOR. While it was slightly stinging, the article was fair and accurate. It showed a handful of New York City beekeepers behaving childishly, and I was there among them, perhaps no better. The story publicized a real rift that has always existed in the New York City beekeeping population, which may have made us appear to the rest of the beekeeping world as a bit, well, ridiculous. Rightly so I have to admit.

  Mr. Coté and Mr. [Pantstootight] had once attended beekeeping functions together. But Mr. Coté had a more ambitious plan for a professional beekeeping association and started his own group in 2008.

  Well, attended same functions, yes; together, no. About the NYCBA it was true. Until we formed it, there was no association in existence in New York City that held monthly meetings, offered coursework on beekeeping, had a beekeeping apprenticeship program, or provided a bee package delivery service. I started the NYCBA to fill a need in the community, and to enjoy beekeeping with like-minded people. Prior to that, any interested beekeepers needed to go to New Jersey, Long Island, or Connecticut to find a reasonably sized and active beekeeping club. That seemed crazy in a city of millions. I knew we could hold our own.

  Because Mr. Coté’s group regularly worked with the health department and the New York Police Department’s Emergency Services Unit on such rescues, he was able to secure a police van with a crane, a chain saw, and the services of the Police Department’s resident bee handler. Mr. Coté oversaw the rescue work.

  As throngs of beekeepers and the curious congregated within the thin piece of yellow caution tape roping off the area around the tree, tensions rose. And even as the wood chips were flying, the two beekeeping groups squabbled over how the rescue should be conducted and who the rightful owner of the bees was.

  When we were in the midst of taking the limb down, upon seeing that the prize hive was indeed within grasp, the costumed beeks below began buzzing with delight and excitement—like a hive bubbling with activity as the weather warms. And why not? It was exciting. Bees, dizzying heights, equipment that made lots of noise, a muted hint of danger.

  The NYT went on to reveal the wet-blanket, sour-grapes nature of Poindexter Pantstootight:

  [Mr. Pantstootight] said he tried to halt the operation on Sunday because the high winds trailing the storm added to an already potent combination of stinging insects, heights and chain saws. But when his words were not heeded, he left the park. “There was a lot more testosterone floating around than common sense,” he said.

  “That’s strange of him to say, since he lacks both,” my father said aloud upon reading the story.

  Most important, once the bees were on the ground, it seemed to Tony and me that the neighborly thing to do was to share them. We both had more hives and bees than we really needed, and some of these hobbyist beekeepers would double their holdings with this one hive. And so, as The New York Times reported:

  And in the end, who would claim the Fort Greene bees? A compromise, of sorts, was reached….

  On Monday, the comb was carefully excised from the branch and the bees were transferred to wooden frames in a procedure that involved a vacuum, serrated bread knives and rubber bands.

  Ms. Dory will house the bees and, if they survive the winter, she will give half of them, in what is known as a “split,” to Ms. Dorn….She called Mr. Coté to thank him for efforts. Without his help, she said, her hive would not have survived.

  But sometimes there are no real winners. Poorly managed, the bees died that winter.

  OCTOBER

  It is the honey which makes us cruel enough to ignore the death of a bee.

  —MUNIA KHAN

  The year after Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy hit. Sandy was the worst storm to affect New York in more than three hundred years. Two days before Sandy was set to strike the city, I drove over to Brooklyn to meet Chase Emmons at Pier K of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They had been destined for a rooftop view, but for whatever reason, the twenty beehives that I’d dropped off in March were still on the dock, just a few feet from the water. With the impending storm, I was concerned that these beehives—all overwintered beehives and strong genetic specimens—were in peril in their spot only two feet above sea level. Chase agreed and asked me to come help move them.

  The idea was that we would carry each of the hives to a nearby elevated spot to keep them from being swept away when the waters started to rise. We looked over the hives. They were two deeps, meaning that there were two levels of boxes per hive. I had stapled them together for transport back in March, and, five months later, they were still stapled. This guaranteed that the lower boxes of frames had never been inspected. It was disappointing, but not the most urgent issue facing us. Chase was looking at the lay of the land and shaking his head. “It seems like a lot of work to move them,” he lamented.

  And so, despite the purpose of my agreed-upon trip there, he determined that the hives would be fine exactly where they were. We were friendly enough, and I tried to dissuade him from leaving them so close to the water. “We can have it done in about an hour, probably less,” I told him truthfully. There was a rise about fifteen feet away, and we could have just hauled them up there one at a time. Drone that he was, he would not budge for the bees, and so I left him and the twenty beehives on the dock and continued to secure as many of my own hives as I could before the hurricane hit. One of the beekeeping apprentices also in the truck told me, “No way those hives won’t end up floating down the East River.”

  Yuliana and I spent most of the evening of the storm enjoying the safety and warmth of my tenement studio apartment on Broome Street on the Lower East Side, and the old building showed every year of its century-plus age in the howling wind that night. I had loaded up two five-gallon pails with water, had
a chest full of ice, and even a generator chained in the back of my nearby truck, just in case. When the electricity cut out, we enjoyed the dinner I had prepared earlier on my gas stove, drank wine by beeswax candlelight, and watched a movie on my laptop. When the battery on that died, we were content to listen to my old transistor AM radio. We even foolhardily went for a walk when the wind was violent enough to make stoplights swing dangerously and traffic signs bend and sway; some signs were trying desperately to dislodge themselves from the pavement in the fierce sustained gusts. It was hard to imagine my urban hives or anyone else’s surviving all this, but I had secured my own as best I could, strapping some together and moving them as far as possible from the edges of roofs. There wasn’t much I could do but wait it out.

  At daybreak I peered out my oversized windows and looked toward the Williamsburg Bridge. In the foreground I saw the ruinous aftermath of Sandy: pockets of the city littered with fallen power lines and broken tree branches, and soggy debris floating in streets flooded with murky rainwater. I drove Yuliana back uptown to her apartment across from Lincoln Center and promptly turned my truck back downtown to survey the storm damage and check out some of my apiaries in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.

  I found that my beehives were all fine, thanks to a combination of preparation and, more important but harder to guarantee, good luck. The Bridge Cafe, on the corner of Water and Dover streets in the Financial District, was now flooded with deep water. The beehives were on the rooftop—the site of the memorable Cake Boss filming—where I had left them. Sadly, the business would never recover. Restaurant owner Adam Weprin eventually sold the historic building.

  Instead of moving them to nearby safety, Chase left the Grange beehives on the docks and placed cinder blocks and sandbags on top of them—which did nothing but help drown the bees faster. I was saddened but not surprised.