Honey and Venom

by Andrew Coté

  In 2010, the factory was being run by Arthur Mondella, Jr., the grandson of the founder, Arthur, Sr. Arthur Mondella had a son he named Ralph, and Ralph named his son Arthur, Jr. Despite Ralph’s confusion as to how that naming tradition traditionally works, the Mondellas enjoyed a prosperous business—until there was a hitch. One of Arthur, Jr.’s large clients reported to Arthur that a bee was found inside one of the jars of cherries they’d ordered. That solitary anonymous bereft-of-life bee in its urn of cherries and sweet goo is how I got to know Arthur.

  But I already knew about a problem in connection with the bees and the factory. Five beekeepers in Brooklyn had independently reached out to me and reported that their honey was varying shades of red, the reddest being the closest to the factory and the hue fading as the distance between the beehive in question and the factory increased. The Department of Health had already been on the case, in its own way, by issuing nuisance violations to some of the beekeepers. One was David Selig, a beekeeping friend who had beehives in Red Hook. In the late summer of 2010 he wrote to me about the “interesting situation”:

  Hey Andrew! I am in an interesting situation! My Red Hook hives have drawn the nearby Maraschino cherry factory’s ire! I got a warning from DOH telling me that they are issuing me a violation for the bees since they are a nuisance to my neighbors! My honey is red like cranberry juice and carries red dye #40; had a sample tested. The cherry factory uses outdoor space and has open bins of high fructose corn syrup w/dye marinating the cherries. Lots of junk must get into the juice besides bees! The factory is sloppy and pours lots of syrup into the rain drain on the street corner which also feeds my bees. There are 9 other hives (including 4 on governor’s island) collecting red “honey” but are now feeding sugar water at the hives to keep bees from cherry juice. I’m sharing this in part for you to know the story but also to seek your advice.

  I also heard from Tim O’Neal, who currently teaches biology at New Voices Middle School in Brooklyn, and who has been beekeeping since he was in middle school himself. Despite what you’ve read heretofore about some of his beekeeping buffoonery (he of the split-pants fame), Tim knows more about honey bees than the average New York City beekeeper. He also helped maintain beehives at a small farm in Red Hook called Added Value, and those bees, like David Selig’s, were bringing in red goo and turning it into a metallic-tasting slush. Like David, Tim had gathered samples and sent them to the state for analysis.

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  All sorts of crazy stories about honey bees circulate around the world from time to time. Most at least begin from a kernel of truth. Way back a decade or so before the start of the twentieth century, there was a widely reported race between pigeons and honey bees to determine which could fly faster. As random as this may sound, during Victorian times, there were much stranger things happening in the British world. Women routinely bought packets of heroin gel from Harrods for personal use. The more fashionable among them wore hats adorned with stuffed cats and squirrels. Men raced against dogs in swimming matches across the Thames or wrestled bears (usually to the detriment of the former). Postmortem photography was all the rage, complete with propping up a dead relative, forcing his or her unseeing eyes open, and positioning old dead auntie or uncle among the living kinfolk to create a keepsake portrait. So the idea that beekeepers and pigeon fanciers might collaborate on such a project doesn’t seem so outlandish.

  Though the story originated slightly earlier in Europe, on April 16, 1892, The Caulfield and Elsternwick Leader, with offices in Melbourne, Australia, ran the headline BEES VS. PIGEON IN A FLYING MATCH. It described a race that took place in Germany (though it was northern England by some accounts and Belgium in others) where “almost a king’s ransome [changed] hands” over the great debate as to which winged creature would home faster. The distance was sometimes reported as between two villages. The bees were supposedly rolled in flour first, so as to identify them upon return to the hive. Despite this obvious handicap, the bees, it is said, won handily, even though the two-winged fliers had been the favorite. “The first bee came in twenty-five seconds before the first pigeon. Three more before the second. The rest were not classed.”

  It was a great story that was reprinted for years all around the globe—and it was completely false. It was made out of whole cloth and swallowed by nearly everyone.

  Back in Red Hook with the red honey, enter Cerise Mayo. Because cerise means cherry in French, some reporters initially had their guard up, understandably believing this tale to be a hoax. It wasn’t; it was Cerise’s hives on Governors Island that David Selig mentioned in his email to me. Gita Nandan, who along with Tim helped maintain the beehives at Added Value, sent the NYCBA some photographs of the red honey. The executive director of Added Value, Ian Marvy, also reached out. The beekeeping community in Red Hook was concerned not only for the bees, but also—to their credit—for the factory and the livelihood of the owners and workers as well. As Gerry Gomez Pearlberg, another Brooklyn beekeeper and poet chimed in, the situation was “definitely one of the more, er, colorful, beekeeping stories we’ve heard in a while!”

  It was a fascinating problem, but it was not my problem. Until it was. In short order I heard from a man named John Bozek, who worked for the Business Outreach Center, a group in New York City that seeks to “improve the economic prospects of traditionally underserved groups, with a focus on low- and moderate-income entrepreneurs and their communities, and thereby create genuinely brighter futures.” Though the cherry factory had been, at that point, owned by wealthy white guys for more than seventy years, most of their employees are minorities, so, maybe that is why Bozek and his group were involved. However John Bozek came to represent them, he wrote in part:

  We need somebody to act as a “bee consultant” in a difficult case in Brooklyn. One of our clients, a factory that has been in business for 50 years [sic] and employs 30 people in the community, has had a serious problem with a neighboring apiary.

  So we set up a meeting with the factory owner. Since the media had broken the story, there were reporters camped out in front of the factory at nearly all times. To prevent a media melee, I asked if six A.M. would work. “I’ll make it my business to be there,” responded Arthur.

  The day before the meeting with Arthur, I met with the Red Hook–area beekeepers to make sure we were all on the same page, and we were. They wanted to solve the problem for the sake of their bees, and they wished to be good neighbors as they gentrified the community in as sensitive and respectful a way as they could manage.

  The first time I visited the cherry factory, Vivian Wang asked to accompany me. Vivian, who had begun beekeeping that year, was an attorney who worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council. In fact, she spent two years there, then left to work for the Department of Justice, and is now back again at NRDC. Born in Taiwan and raised in Texas, she moved to New York to attend Columbia undergraduate and law schools, and came armed with a master’s in environmental policy from Oxford University thrown in for good measure. She is a champion of the environment and, in 2010, a newly minted beekeeper. So this was a fascinating problem for her and right up her alley.

  We thought this was an unusual case. We were partially wrong. It turns out to be fairly common practice for the creative foraging of honey bees to result in honey that is unusual in both taste and appearance. In 1932, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran a story that read, in part, “Beekeeping in a very thickly settled city…would be difficult because there would be too much danger of the bees getting into mischief if they happened to pass a candy factory or any place where there was a sweet.” Turns out it is true.

  A World War II–era Coca-Cola factory in England had issues with honey bees foraging in their spillage and beekeepers ended up with a sickly grayish-brown honey-like goop. An M&M’s factory in France enabled honey bees to create weird concoctions of oddly colored honey-like substances. A
pallet of melted Popsicles in East New York resulted in green-hued honey in that area of Brooklyn. Antifreeze from a shabbily run auto mechanic’s shop in Queens once produced blue-green honey-like poison. There’s a long list of similar stories from all over the world, but still, the Red Hook story was compelling and stood out for reasons that will become clear.

  Once again The New York Times blasted the lid off Pandora’s bee-box. A front-page story about “red honey” from bees in the industrial area of Red Hook, Brooklyn, outlined how the honey bees were lapping up high-fructose corn syrup and Red Dye No. 40 from the runoff from a maraschino cherry factory, and, as a result, trouble was brewing for all parties. The bees’ little translucent bodies glowed cardinal in the afternoon sun as they returned to their hives after a day of foraging, and the “honey” that they produced had an eerie hue. “When the sun is a bit down, they glow red in the evenings,” Selig said. “They were slightly fluorescent. And it was beautiful.”

  My approach with Arthur was three-pronged. First, I worked with him at the factory to improve practices as related to insect access. We screened every possible opening to keep the bees out of the production area, and the factory stopped dumping the syrup into the street. Second, I ran interference with the fifty-plus media outlets seeking comment. Lastly, I was the intermediary with the beekeepers. The problem should have been cleared up as far as we could tell, but by then it was too cold for bees to fly to the factory to partake of any spillage anyway, and the damage had already been done to the beehives. The yield for the beekeepers was ruined for the season. Happily, the issue of red honey did not resurface for the beekeepers the following year, and the maraschino cherries continued to be shipped all over the world bee-free, without their cherry containers doubling as bee urns.

  So all seemed well and good. Unfortunately for Arthur, though, his real troubles had just begun. Rumors, temporarily obscured by the red honey fiasco, began to recirculate that there might be marijuana being grown in the factory. One could occasionally catch a strong whiff of it in the neighborhood, but this was usually attributed to workers taking a toke on their break.

  Arthur was a bit of an odd duck, too. His second wife had been a mail-order bride, and the woman about to be his third was a former adult film star. He was certainly a private person. Most people who have massive illegal marijuana grow centers in secret subterranean rooms have reason to be private. It turns out that the factory was equipped with a covert basement, not included on any plans or documents, “twenty-five hundred square feet, [with] space for about a hundred marijuana plants in a well-set-up system of hydroponic cultivation under L.E.D. grow lights,” wrote Ian Frazier in The New Yorker. (In spite of my chagrin regarding Arthur’s problems, I will always remember the flattering way in which Ian portrayed me in the article. “[Andrew] is a handsome, hazel-eyed man of French-Canadian parentage, with a suave black beard going gray.” Free honey for life, Ian.)

  When I worked with Arthur, he was anxious to solve the problem with the honey bees and acted quickly to do so. I appreciated his earnestness in that regard, whatever his real motivations. Sadly and surprisingly, when the authorities caught up with him, Arthur took his own life with a handgun in the cramped bathroom adjacent to his office while investigators were standing on the other side of the door. Now his two daughters run the company, the fourth generation of Mondellas to do so. Most who knew Arthur speak well of him. He seems to have lived high on the hog, shared what he had with those around him, and was certainly loved and is missed by many.

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  Normally by November, the beehives are wrapped up for the winter. The bees have slowed down from a busy year and begun to tighten their cluster, heating it to 95˚F. Though they do not actually hibernate, they will come close to it. Beekeepers have reduced hives to make the cavities smaller so that the bees have less space to keep warm. We’ve long since removed the fall feeders atop the hive to avoid cold, dripping liquid landing on the cluster of bees. We’ve set up wind blocks to help the bees maintain warmth, and we’ve tightened crank straps in order to keep the hives upright and together, year round.

  Tar paper is sometimes wrapped around the deeps, which are the larger boxes used with Langstroth hives. (They’re larger because they serve as both brood and honey chambers.) The colony may be reduced down to one deep to conserve warmth, or two deeps if it’s a larger colony needing more room to stretch out. In either case, a homasote board may be placed atop the top box to absorb moisture or maybe blankets or sawdust. The mouse guard is screwed into place to stop mice from entering, having babies, and eating up the wax. Some of us even say our prayers—because it can’t hurt. We do all of this because if our bees die during the long winter, we may have no honey to harvest next year. We may have none to sell. We will virtually have to begin anew, perhaps with a package of bees from a farm somewhere down south, or split an overwintered colony from up north as the year begins again.

  By November back in Quebec, mon arrière-grand-père Hector would have by this time placed wooden slabs on the dirt floor of his basement root cellar and carried down as many of his beehives as would fit. This would keep them safe from the wind and the excess cold so that they might better survive the long winter. Over the coming months, the family would enjoy freshly baked bread covered in jam and honey, slowing down and waiting patiently for the spring, just like the bees.

  Far south of Canada in Manhattan, the previous spring I was hired to establish two beehives in the northwest section of New York’s Bryant Park, close to where the Ping-Pong tables are set up. It’s a beautiful park, and April through September, we hold monthly lunchtime talks for large groups that gather to learn about honey bees and related topics. By October the hives are put to bed. The park adds an ice-skating rink to the grounds late in the year, but one recent November, the temperatures were unseasonably warm and the bees were out flying. Of course, there was nothing available for them to gather, nectar or pollen wise. So they made beelines to the one place where they could find sweetness—the ice-skating rink.

  Owen Harring, my liaison at Bryant Park, texted me: Hey Andrew…we are having a problem with the bees and our ice rink….Hopefully not another Maraschino cherry situation! This time it wasn’t cherries the bees were attracted to, but a coolant for the rink called glycol, which is sweet smelling, sweet tasting, and deadly to consume. In fact, there were many bees flittering over the ice, attracted by the scent but unable to penetrate the ice to reach the source of it. Owen was astute to discern that the source of their attraction was ethylene glycol. Lucky for us and the bees both, the weather became seasonally appropriate that week and the problem solved itself. Only a smattering of dead bees were found on the ice, probably the result of hit-and-runs with tourists’ ice skates.

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  Most important, during my best November, my son, Nobuaki, wriggled his way out of his mama and into the world. I recognize he bears an unusual moniker. Nobuaki is written in two kanji: 允 and 章. 允 can be read Nobu (but is more commonly read in), but it’s not really a common kanji these days. It means truly or truthfully; or to tolerate, to forgive. Some say this kanji was created from the shape of a human being captured and held with his arms at his back, in a situation where he is compelled to tell the truth. Other sources interpret it as the shape of a human with extraordinary talent, and that is how I choose to construe it.* There is a four-character idiom 允文允武, which means being truly versed in both literary and military arts, and this dual strength is something that I would like to see my cub realize.

  Then we come to 章. It means to make things clear, distinction, and chapter (which makes ends and beginnings clear). To an extent, people come up with their own interpretation, but putting together those two characters, my translation would be “making the truth clear” or “truly distinctive.”

  Nobuaki was the given name of my martial arts master in Kyoto, Eguchi
Nobuaki. It was a name which, out of respect, I never uttered aloud to Eguchi Sensei—I would never call him by his first name. Eguchi Sensei was a man who treated me like a son; I came to think of him as a second father. My Nobu was born five months after Sensei died. I thought it a meaningful way to keep the name and spirit alive. The first Nobuaki grew up in the ashes of the Second World War, knew great personal loss and hunger, and was a disciplined and learned man. He also had a fantastic sense of humor and devotion to his community. He was a man worthy of respect and love. So it is a felicitous name for a much-wanted child.

  A few addlepated plebeians criticized me for not naming my son after my own blood father. Some people voiced their objections to a little white boy having a Japanese name. Aside from having lived nearly a half century not necessarily adhering to other people’s values, I had discussed this topic with my father. In his usual pragmatic fashion, he quickly concluded, “Let the name ‘Norman’ die with me. I hate my name.”

  It is my hope that young Nobu will follow in my footsteps and learn to work with and love and respect the honey bees. At least I would like for him to fully absorb the hard work ethic for which honey bees are known and celebrated, and which beekeepers must embrace if they are to have any degree of success. Nobu has already been with me on several beekeeping adventures. There is a wonderful photograph of him shaking hands, at eight months old, with the president of the UN General Assembly. Nobu met His Excellency Peter Thomson when we ironed out details to place an apiary on the grounds of the international territory of the United Nations. During that meeting, Nobu, who had recently learned to walk and indeed trot, did so among the flags and furniture of His Excellency’s office while his attentive and sharply dressed staff made sure that Nobu didn’t collide with sharp corners. A fifth generation Fijian by birth, Peter is a down-to-earth, warm, intelligent, and hardworking man who, in addition to many accomplishments prior to his appointment to the United Nations in 2010, served in Tokyo at the Fijian embassy for four years in the 1980s.