by Andrew Coté
In addition to LingLing, we were accompanied by a driver, who drove us for a long time, it seemed, never reaching the end of the massive city. But eventually, after a few stops that included an ancient pharmacy and some odd yet tasty snacks here and there, we arrived at our first and primary destination for the day: the clinic of medical doctor and apitherapist Dr. Zhang.
Apitherapy is the practice of using products from the beehive, specifically the venom of honey bees introduced into the body via a sting, to cure ailments. It is practiced worldwide, and those who support its use claim it helps cure or lessen the pain of multiple sclerosis and arthritis, among other things. The truth is that the results of many medical studies do not support apitherapy. Still, the practice has persisted since the time of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, who used it in their traditional medical practices. A moderately more modern study comes from an Austrian physician who published a monograph in 1888 entitled “About a Peculiar Connection Between the Bee Stings and Rheumatism.” Decades later, in the 1930s, a Hungarian doctor minted the term “bee venom therapy.” (Hungary has a very strong beekeeping tradition.)
Dr. Zhang is the only medical doctor licensed to practice apitherapy in Hangzhou, a city of about twenty million souls. Not that each of them was clamoring to have their ills cured with potentially painful bee stings, but still, he will never be short of patients. There is a lot of competition for medical doctors in China, he told us, and working with honey bees in his treatment regimen helps him to stand out. He completed his medical training in 1972, and began offering apitherapy treatments in 1990, after being asked about it by many of his patients. He conducted his own research and eventually began to keep his own colonies of honey bees since there was no reliable supplier of bee venom or honey bees in the area. He then started practicing on himself in order to learn how best to handle the honey bees and to know firsthand the effects of the stings.
“The first time I tried to sting myself, it was very difficult, and I was having a hard time catching and taking the bee,” he told us through an interpreter. “Then I could not get the bee to sting. Then I saw that I was actually at that point holding on to a fly and not a bee.” We all laughed. Dr. Zhang was a pleasant man who seemed to genuinely want to better his patients’ lives. And he loved his bees, too. A sad and unavoidable irony was that in performing apitherapy, he sacrificed the bees’ lives.
Dr. Zhang practices traditional Chinese medicine, and as part of that practice, is skilled in acupuncture. He easily transitioned the principles of acupuncture into his apitherapy treatments, using the same meridians to apply stings where he once applied metal needles. Dr. Zhang believes that “being a beekeeper makes you a healthier person because you naturally get stung a lot, eat a lot of bee products, live a healthier outdoor lifestyle, and live longer than average.” It may well be true that the Calvinistic approach to toil inherent to beekeeping is a secret to longevity. Waldo McBurney (1902–2009) of Kansas lived to be 106 years old and worked as a beekeeper until nearly the end of his life. He was recognized as the oldest working person in the United States at the time. In any case, Dr. Zhang is currently training his daughter, also a physician, to administer apitherapy as well, to continue his lineage.
Dr. Zhang maintains colonies of beehives atop the fifth floor of the hospital where he works; his wife helps to maintain them. He also runs a small private clinic nearby, which is where we found ourselves that morning. He spoke no English. The six weeks of private Mandarin lessons I took prior to my trip had done me no good at all. We did have an interpreter with us, but it was difficult for her to keep up with three excited beekeepers asking questions and the specialized vocabulary involved. Still, we managed to take in a lot and loved it. We could tell that our host was excited to have a small foreign delegation visiting him in his clinic, too.
We watched as Dr. Zhang treated several patients in his clinic. Arthritis was a common ailment among his elderly clientele, and most of his practice was devoted to assisting those afflicted. One woman was so crippled by arthritis her hands were like claws. She visited the clinic three times a week to receive ten to fifteen stings per hand, which she said allowed her some limited use of them. Without it, she told us, they were totally useless and much more painful.
Some of the treatments, Dr. Zhang freely admitted, were merely for the relative comfort of the patient and not expected to bring about a full recovery. Treatments of multiple sclerosis are palliative, he said, as is the treatment of herniated discs. But arthritis is among the conditions that Dr. Zhang is convinced can be cured in most cases, and he believed that this woman would regain near full use of her hands in time. Dr. Zhang is also looking into how apitherapy can help nerve issues, and possibly tumors or even frostbite. He’s nothing if not ambitious.
My father suffers from chronic neck pain from an injury he received while on the job as a firefighter. We also decided we needed our own guinea pig to test out the efficacy of apitherapy, so Norm was appointed to sit in the chair. The good doctor took a small plastic bottle filled with about thirty live honey bees from the far side of his desk. It looked like an eight-ounce miniature recyclable bottle that had once held soda, and it was cut through the middle so that the entire thing could open up like Pac-Man. It closed when not handled, and it looked to me like the bees should be able to easily get out—but none seemed to. Next to it sat another plastic bottle, this one clearly a former water bottle, that held the still-living worker bees that had already sacrificed their stingers and venom sacks for the betterment of Hangzhou’s apitherapy community. Though honey bees die once they sting and their abdomens tear open, their death is unfortunately not instantaneous.
Because Norm doesn’t hear well, he did not fully realize that he was about to be stung when Dr. Zhang deftly opened the first bottle, extracted a single bee with a pair of tweezers, and pressed her to my father’s neck in one swift motion. It wasn’t quite as impressive as a martial-arts master capturing a fly from the air with a pair of chopsticks, but it was close enough. The bee stung Norm, and he almost imperceptibly jerked forward. The doctor laughed and Norm smiled, protesting that if he’d been ready, he wouldn’t have moved. It is true. Neither my brother nor I react much to bee stings since the only response we ever got from my father while growing up was the sound of his laughter. Soon we learned not to give him that satisfaction. He doesn’t react to a sting too often, either, so we don’t get much of a chance to laugh at him for that.
Immediately post-sting, Dr. Zhang started to tap and massage the area in order to distribute the venom. He administered a few more stings, and Norm accepted them unflinchingly. Later he said his neck felt a little better. But maybe it felt better because the stinging had stopped, like how someone’s head feels better when they stop pounding it against the wall.
* * *
—
Back in Manhattan, Yuliana was experiencing head and neck pain that she’d been unable to shake. She’d tried several different doctors and approaches, exercises, massage, and all sorts of remedies. Though Yuliana is hardly what I would describe as a strong advocate for alternative medicines, she agreed to see a friend of mine, Dr. Patrick Fratellone, a medical doctor and beekeeper who practices apitherapy right out of his office on East Fifty-seventh Street. Like Dr. Zhang in Hangzhou, Dr. Fratellone pulls bees out of his own hives and carries them to his practice in a small container. After some preliminary blood work and an hour’s worth of intake questions and examination, Yuliana was ready to meet with him two weeks later to be stung.
This would be only the second time she’d ever been stung by a honey bee. The first time was atop the now-defunct Waldorf Astoria. That iconic hotel was near her office, and I would often plan my routine maintenance of that apiary around her lunch schedule. On this day I’d had an interview with a reporter from a Norwegian magazine. Yuliana waited for me a respectful distance away on the roof—respectful of the bees, so as to avoid stings. The
re was a sprawling raised garden there where the hotel chefs like Peter Betz cultivated small apple trees, strawberries, mint, and tomatoes, among other delectables destined for the five restaurants in the hotel.
As Yuliana wandered through the garden twenty floors above Park Avenue, she heard a screech. A bee had become entangled in the photographer’s curly hair. The scared Scandinavian started shouting and flailing around wildly, almost uncontrollably, it seemed. If it weren’t for the four-foot-high parapet, she surely would have become airborne and her story would have had a very different ending. I did not dare approach her myself. I was wearing a veil and jacket that had absorbed so many bee stings that day that my presence in her proximity, with bees still hovering around me, would have been pouring kerosene on a fire.
Yuliana calmly approached the reporter and dislodged the bee from her long locks, but in doing so, earned herself a sting on the finger. “No good deed goes unpunished,” I told her later, which she did not find helpful or amusing, though I assured her it was both.
“I had to look like I knew what I was doing, since I was the girlfriend of a beekeeper. I had to save face, too. So I did not let on that I had been stung,” Yuliana replied in her usual soft tone. A long pause. Then she mused, “It’s cheaper than Botox and the results are probably similar if the stings are in the right places.”
“ ‘Bee-tox’?” I offered helpfully, and again, unappreciated.
The photographer had refused to wear the veil I’d offered her, explaining that it would interfere with her ability to use her camera. Lots of photographers and videographers refuse the veil and end up stung. I suppose they know the risks when they take the job. Trained by my father, I have to stifle a laugh when others are stung.
The point is that Yuliana did not appear to be allergic to honey bee stings. In fact, only about 1 percent of the population is. Many people will react with localized swelling and itchiness after the initial prick and injection of venom, but a sting isn’t life threatening to most people. On the other hand, saying the wrong thing to a Ukrainian woman is a surefire way to put one’s life in jeopardy. The world is full of dangers.
I mentioned that Yuliana resembles Gwyneth Paltrow. In some photos, in fact, the resemblance is uncanny. With the greatest affection for both women, they both seem to have a few sandwiches missing from their respective picnic baskets. As of late, Gwyneth has been known not only as a star of stage and screen, but off-screen as an advocate for some unconventional health regimens. For instance, she has lamented the possibility that we may in fact be hurting the feelings of our glass of water by expressing negative thoughts around it, since, she says, water has feelings, too. She has also been quoted as using mugwort to steam sensitive areas of her body to rejuvenate them. Germane to our tale, along with an increasing number of Hollywood celebrities, Gwyneth purposely had honey bees sting her face for health benefits. “It’s actually pretty incredible…but, man, is it painful,” said the woman who plays Pepper Potts. But if her look-alike could handle bee stings as a cheap Botox substitute, Yuliana decided, so could she.
At the very least we knew that Yuliana was unlikely to die from anaphylactic shock from the intended apitherapy. She liked Dr. Fratellone, whom I’d first met about a decade earlier, when he gave a talk to the NYCBA on behalf of the American Apitherapy Society. I decided to accompany Yuliana to the office visit because I wanted to know exactly where and how Dr. F. would have the bees sting her, and not in the slightest bit because I enjoy seeing her in a little pain, I swear. If it proved effective, I would treat her myself as often as necessary, or maybe more for good measure, just to bring her relief from her head and neck pain and, again, not at all from any muted sense of enjoyment on my own part.
In the end, it was all up to me. Dr. Fratellone wasn’t available one day when Yuliana’s neck pain became too much for her to tolerate. “Just get a handful of your bees and let’s try it!” she surprised me by saying one day. So I did what she said—almost. I went to a nearby apiary and managed to coax a dozen or so worker bees into a small box—it was cool outside, so this was not the easiest of tasks—which I then quickly put inside my coat for safekeeping and warmth. The box was secure but allowed airflow, and the bees could not escape. That is, so long as I closed it snugly, which of course I did not. So by the time I got back to our apartment, I had conducted accidental self-apitherapy, a new concept, on my chest and stomach. Still, I had half a dozen workers ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for Yuliana’s betterment.
She lay down on the bed and flipped her long blond hair up over her head. I felt like she was hiding her face to mask her pain, or perhaps even her tears. But I didn’t waste any time by dwelling on that; one must break the shell of an egg to make an omelet. I set to work, gingerly gripping the bees one by one by gripping their wings with my fingertips, pressing them against her flesh, and thereby provoking them to sting her. Within a few minutes there were half a dozen pulsating venom sacks protruding from her neck and shoulders. There was some localized swelling and a little redness. I made sure all of the poison was in, removed the stingers, rubbed the area with a little alcohol like I had at the onset—both to disinfect the area and to distribute the venom—and she turned over and sat up.
“Are you all right?” I asked, concerned, since she had not said much to me.
“Yes,” the master of understatement and subtlety responded. I thought she might sound weepy.
“It didn’t hurt?”
Yuliana paused, looked at me with narrowed eyes, then chuckled. “Growing up in Soviet Union, dentist did not use anything to dull the pain before he drilled into bone. I birthed both my children with no painkiller. You think your little pets are going to…what…make me cry?” And she stood up, shook her hair back, and walked out of the room, still laughing. The former Pioneer didn’t turn around when she said, “I don’t know if it helped my neck pain, but was nice of you to try. Make sure your bugs are not on floor for baby to crawl on.”
And that first and last treatment was the extent of her apitherapy regimen.
NOVEMBER
I don’t like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
A century ago on the family farm in Quebec, my grandmother would glide back and forth on the swings that hung from the strong boughs of the cherry trees at the rear of the property by the old stone wall. At one point or another, she and each of her thirteen siblings—the progeny of faithful Catholics, begot by one father and two consecutive mothers, and perhaps just as much the result of long winters without television—used to frolic beneath those branches near to where their father, Hector, kept about a dozen of his beehives. The children were so comfortable with the bees that they used the beehives as step stools in order to better reach the higher branches. Several of the elder siblings had their own particular perch where they would sit and feast on cherries. My grandmother’s sister Jeanne Laramée told me, “The cherries were small. But we ate them. They were like the family dessert. Marie-Blanche, Marie-Ange, Jean-Maurice, Marcelle, and I, we each had our branch-seat and tasted the cherries right from the trees. When in autumn they had a little frost, they were even better. My mother made delicious jellies, surettes, and sweets, too, and stretched on a hunk of bread coming out of the oven, it was very good.”
In the shade of those trees, the children could watch the bees fly back and forth through the air as they did much the same. The bees never bothered them at all except for two weeks in late June or early July when the fruit would ripen. Some of it was too high to reach and so it would overripen, becoming irresistible to the bees, and so for a fortnight every year the children abandoned their swings and played elsewhere. They would perhaps spend more time with the cows, sheep, or the two horses, one of which was used to till the land and one whose sole purpose, as recalled by my ninety-three-year-old Tanté Je
anne, was to take the family to church on Sunday in the buggy, after placing hot coals in iron boxes to keep the children’s feet and backsides warm.
Cherries similar to the ones from my great-grandfather’s trees are used in the manufacture of maraschino cherries, a business that is surprisingly large and rife with competition. The harvested cherries arrive at the factory in a dried-up state and are then reconstituted with a solution of FD&C Red 40—also known as Red Dye No. 40—sugar syrup, and a few choice ingredients to produce a plump, unnaturally red, perversely sweet cherry creation suitable for adorning ice cream sundaes.
The largest of all the maraschino cherry factories in the United States was founded in 1946 by Arthur Mondella, Sr., in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where the film On the Waterfront was set and the gangster Al Capone was raised. Red Hook has experienced a renaissance in the last decade. For a century it had been an underserved industrial area but is now, like much of Brooklyn, gentrifying. Through it all, Dell’s Maraschino Cherries has prospered for nearly seventy years. In 2011 it was reported to be a $20 million a year business thanks to contracts with Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, and Chick-fil-A, among many other chains, some of which appropriate their sickeningly sweet cherries from Dell’s not just in red but in a rainbow of colors.
Late in the season my great-grandfather’s honey bees would zero in on the branches of the cherry trees unreachable to him and exploit the drippings from the splits of the overripe fleshy red fruit, or buzz curiously and helplessly around the jarred fruit in the nearby kitchen, hoping in vain to penetrate a clear glass jar, much as they do at my farmers’ market stall in autumn. The honey bees of Red Hook had it much easier than their Canuck cousins. They needed only to navigate to Dikeman Street to fill their bellies with the sweet liquid that flowed down the streets and into the sewers. Very much against environmental regulations, Dell’s habitually took the excess liquid used to bloat up the cherries and discharged it right into the road. It looked like blood running down the cobblestones.