by Andrew Coté
The idea to place the beehives was the brainchild of his wonderful wife, Marijcke, who worked with me from the start, throughout the installation, and beyond. She was aware of Bees Without Borders after having read about a program my father and I had initiated in Fiji several years prior. The Fiji BWB trip was the first time that we had traveled to a place free from war or conflict to do beekeeping classes and workshops, and it proved to be a wonderful experience. We worked on the main island of Viti Levu and in the Yasawa Islands, including Turtle Island. We fell in love with Fiji and Fijians, while spending time pulling feral honey bees out of trees, managing neglected colonies, and teaching beekeepers a bit about marketing their honey—not in upcycled plastic water bottles—to the honeymooning tourists who would, and did, pay top dollar for it, providing much-needed surplus income to the Fijian beekeepers.
Anyway, while planning the UN apiary, Marijcke and I met at their apartment and in meeting rooms across the street from the UN to strategize. Of course, I also had to sit in many meetings at the UN, mostly with the companionship of Katherine Morris, former army, the wife of Australia’s deputy defense attaché, and one of NYCBA’s beekeeping apprentices. We went from office to office, long meeting to longer meeting, month after month, and finally the United Nations, an organization known for seemingly insurmountable red tape, gave the green light.
For the actual installation of the beehives, in addition to Katherine and my father, several of my beekeeping buddies lined up to assist. It was no small joy to be on the North Lawn of the United Nations, an area not open to the public. The beehives themselves, I felt, needed to be painted the blue for which the United Nations is known. I called on my young friend Tristan Pinto, brother to Sasha (who had assisted me at MoMA in creating those small building-like beehives) and a creative fellow in his own right. Tristan came up with an eye-catching three-dimensional design that showcased the Bees Without Borders logo on the fronts and backs of the beehives, and beautified the trinity of boxes in a way that I could not have. He also helped with the bee work at the opening ceremony, as did Sasha and Hannah, of course Allison, and, naturally, Norm and Nobu. Along with Peter Thomson; his wife, Marijcke; and a large group of others, we celebrated the installation of extraterritorial honey bees as they represented many of the sustainable development goals of the United Nations.
The bees are not the only residents of the North Lawn. In 2016 an eyesore of a building was removed to open up the expanse of green again, making room for a number of sculptures and statues from around the world. The first was Arrival, a bronze ship cast in depiction of a potato famine–era coffin ship. The 2008 creation of Irish artist John Behan, it was the sort of ship that my maternal grandfather’s family would have taken to immigrate to the United States from Ireland when the famine forced them to flee or die. Seeing it a stone’s throw from the apiary always reminds me of a family of Irish beekeepers, notably Micheál and Aoife Mac Giolla Coda, who are well-known breeders of native Irish black bees in the Galtee Vee Valley.
Whether due to his love of dragons or as a result of his maternal lineage, a favorite of Nobu’s among the works of art on the North Lawn is the Soviet Union’s 1990 contribution of their interpretation of Saint George fighting a dragon. In this piece, the dragon represents nuclear arms, and “is made of decommissioned Soviet SS-20 and US Pershing II missiles. It’s kind of like DIY, only with dangerous military waste,” according to BuzzFeed News.
In November 1989, I was a teenager backpacking through Europe when the Berlin Wall came down and citizens began dismantling it with hammers, shovels, and their bare hands. I still have a piece of it from then. Fast-forward three decades, and a huge section of the wall now resides on the North Lawn, between a statue of a fellow on a horse from the former Yugoslavia and an avatar-like figure from Mongolia. I take no credit for the Berlin Wall being demolished, other than the one small piece that I wrested from it, thanks to those who enthusiastically demolished the barricade. However, twenty-eight years later, while reversing my truck on the pathway while servicing the UN beehives, I nearly took a section of that iconic wall down for the second time. I had some wood sticking out of the back of my pickup truck that brought me a bit too close for comfort to initiating an international incident.
Some at the United Nations would have been appreciative had I reversed into the one truly scandalous sculpture on the grounds. Just west of the apiary is an elephant statue with an impressively engorged penis the size of a thick tree trunk. Honestly, the elephant appears to have five legs, or four plus an enormous kickstand. At first I thought there must have been some extremely attractive female elephants around when the thing was sculpted, but the truth is even stranger: A live elephant was drugged and cast to make the sculpture. In 1998, somehow Nepal, Kenya, and Namibia got together and decided to find an African bull elephant, put it to sleep, and make a cast of it. The process, for whatever reason, stimulated the libido of the Proboscidea. The result is a statue near the beehives that shows the proud elephant with a full-mast erection. I wish I had been there to hear the discussion as to how the situation would be handled, but in the end, the powers that be at the United Nations found a decidedly diplomatic solution. There is a generous amount of shrubbery strategically placed around the supremely well-endowed statue, and modesty prevails.
There’s some irony in the apiary being placed in such close proximity to that lusty pachyderm: Elephants and honey bees do not get along. In fact, honey bee cultivation has been used in Kenya and elsewhere as an elegant solution to a dangerous problem of elephants trampling villages and killing people. This has become an unexpected issue because villages and homes have been built in the elephants’ traditional migratory paths. To avoid inadvertent trampling of people, ruination of crops, and conflict between people and elephants that leads to the harm of one or the other or both, fences laced with beehives have been put in place near crops and homes in several countries where elephants journey. Sometimes there is a rope attached to the beehive, and that is stretched across an area near crops. If and when a hungry wandering elephant jostles the rope, the colony is disturbed, and the bees repel their big-eared foe. It is both a simple solution and an effective one. I’ve worked constructing some of these beehive fences myself. Elephants approach, encounter the bees, and turn in another direction without any real harm to any party. Elephants are hulking creatures, but they do not enjoy stings inside their trunks or ears.
So I like to think of the beehives at the United Nations as serving multiple purposes. They draw attention to the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. Their residents are the reason for World Bee Day (May 20!). They pollinate the rose garden and provide honey for the diplomatic corps of the world. And, finally, they keep the diplomats safe from a certain randy bull elephant that might trample or otherwise interfere with their peacemaking.
* All Japanese names have specific meanings depending on the choice and combination of the kanji.
DECEMBER
“The only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you’re a bee.”
Then he thought a long time and said: “And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey….And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.”
—A. A. MILNE, Winnie-the-Pooh
Generally being a law-abiding sort of guy, I was surprised to find myself in the hot seat in a small, windowless interrogation room in Harlem’s Twenty-eighth Precinct one morning in 2018. There was a white table with links bolted to the top to secure handcuffed suspects, and a small one-way mirror recessed in the grungy wall. While I was not handcuffed, the door was closed and I felt slightly claustrophobic. I sat waiting and rereading an English translation of “In a Grove,” a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, from a book that happened to have been in my back pocket and wasn’t deemed a weapon (though knowledge is power). In the story, a man is detained by the police and is interr
ogated. The larger theme is how one event is seen differently through different sets of eyes. In this sense the character’s situation and mine were similar, though mine lacked the swordplay, rape, and murder.
I had been one block away from the school my son attends on the Upper West Side near Central Park. I was in the company of my friend Jim Pletcher, a recently retired associate provost at Denison University who had been apprenticing all year with the NYCBA. Jim and I had been standing next to his car, which was parked near mine, moving beekeeping equipment from one vehicle to the other. I spotted three men walking briskly toward us.
I quickly surmised that they were among New York’s finest. They may have been in plainclothes, but it was obvious from their comportment, if not the badges clipped to the belts or bouncing from chains around their necks, and from their clearly visible firearms, that they were the law. They were all a bit younger than me, fit, and unshaven. They were pretty friendly, in fact. But, as Jim later said, “They looked like they could be pretty unfriendly, too.” They had been sitting—for who knows how long?—down the block from my pickup truck waiting for me to arrive. With my plans for the day now altered, Jim and I shook hands and parted ways, he in his car, and me and my three new friends in their vehicle, at their insistence.
After establishing that I was Andrew Coté and not some other short, pudgy, gray-haired bearded beekeeper hauling beekeeping equipment around Manhattan, they said, “We just want to ask you a few questions at the station,” as if I was in a Law & Order episode. Two of them bookended me and hustled me toward a soccer mom–style minivan they were using that day. The third hopped into the driver’s seat.
If they wanted to be undercover, that ride was the right choice; it certainly was a departure from what I would consider a law enforcement vehicle. If I saw that thing pull to the side of the road, I would have expected a few kids with sports equipment to hop out of the side before I would ever have imagined three armed detectives emerging from it. But whatever was happening, it was surely serious, given that the NYPD had dedicated three men to sit and wait for me until I showed up to my truck, which had been parked in that spot for a few days. I decided against using the “What’s this all about?” line. I did not technically have to go with them, since I was not under arrest. But I thought that it was best to just clear up whatever problem there was. They might have found me at a less opportune time—when I was selling at the market, for instance, or when I was visiting a client, or with my kid at the playground. Better to get it over with, I figured, whatever it was.
The detectives were friendly and chatty as they drove me to the station, and since I did not know why I was there, I kept my responses vague. They informed me they were not the primaries on the investigation for which I was picked up. They didn’t seem to mind indirectness any more than I fretted over their vagueness—they weren’t interviewing me—but they did have a lot of questions about bees.
This is a fascinating constant for me. On occasion it borders on being a problem. On the one hand, I am delighted that people are interested in honey bees, and what I do, and how the whole enthralling and sweet world of beekeeping works. People are especially interested in urban beekeeping and have no end of questions about it. I want to always be positive and endeavor to take the questions and the person seriously, and be grateful for their interest.
Still, the truth is, when I can get away with it, I often avoid telling people what I do for a living. I skip dinner parties. I even try to avoid telling a doctor during an appointment or a barber during a haircut what I do, because I fear that I will be, as I usually am, met with a barrage of questions that are sometimes too much for me to answer. As fascinating as honey bees genuinely are to me, at a social function I might sometimes want to talk about a film, an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (unrelated to bees), politics, or anything else. I don’t wish to sound ungrateful—I know how fortunate I am to do something I love—and it is very nice that people are interested in it enough to, say, buy a book about it—but sometimes I need a bee break. In fact, one of the reasons that Yuliana and I get on so well, I think, is because she is not interested in the ancient art of the apiarist, or “Whatever it is exactly you do all day on the rooftops with your—your bees,” as she puts it.
An exception to this is when I want to keep law enforcement in a good mood. Back in the unmarked minivan that one of the detectives had, it appeared, borrowed from his mother, I answered bee questions with a big smile. At their promptings I explained how the bees go about gathering the nectar to turn it into honey; just what propolis is; and what bees do during the winter. (This is something that many, many people wonder and ask about.) Then I started to wonder about my own winter. I was due the next day to go down to an island in the Caribbean to establish an apiary on a private farm on Cayman Brac in the Cayman Islands for a Serbian businesswoman. She had established a young orchard and wanted to ensure pollination. And she wanted local honey. There were no honey bees on that island, and the main beekeeper on Grand Cayman refused to sell her any. The plan was to bring a couple of dozen beehives via boat from Cuba right down to the smaller island of a country best known for its shell corporations and being a tax haven. Now, instead of the Cayman Islands, I feared ending up on Rikers Island, New York City’s notorious jail where 85 percent of the daily average of 10,000 inmates have not yet been convicted of a crime. I didn’t want to make it 10,001. I wanted to drink Cuba libres and remain free myself.
* * *
—
Sometimes the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene seeks me out to assist with honey bee matters. Their inspectors seem to be all good people but have no training in and no extensive knowledge of practical beekeeping, and no budget is allocated to change that. Among other matters, several times per year the department asks the NYCBA, or me specifically, to assist in removing beehives. If indeed it is a colony of honey bees and not a wasp nest, it is usually the same old story: Someone has placed a beehive on property that is not theirs. The property owner, not knowing whom to contact, tries various city entities. Eventually the property owner is directed to DOHMH. DOHMH checks its books and tries to locate the owner of the beehive. If the hive is not registered, there is no way to know to whom the beehive belongs. DOHMH then asks the NYCBA if we know to whom the colony belongs. We check our records and reach out via social media, giving not quite enough data to identify the location to an opportunist, but enough clues that the true owner would recognize it; this to avoid someone claiming a hive that is not theirs. Sometimes we put a note on the hive and wait a week or two. Our approach depends on the situation. If all of the above fail, DOHMH asks us to physically take possession of the beehive and remove it from the premises. “This falls somewhere under the purposely loosely worded nuisance clauses in the regulation,” said Nancy Clark, who was the primary force within DOHMH that most helped us to win legalization. Nancy is now retired and has gotten big into the grandmothering business. She stops by my honey stand at Union Square regularly, and we swap bee and baby stories.
Anyhoo, one time DOHMH told us that a particularly negligent person had placed two beehives on a fire escape. Those we removed within three hours without any attempt to find the owners. We all felt (DOHMH included, of course, as it is always their call) that a citizen imprudent enough to place a beehive on a fire escape should not be handling bees. That person, in fact, probably should not be allowed to mix with the general public at all without supervision. Someone who is fleeing an apartment due to smoke and fire has enough to worry about without also, in blinding thick smoke, tripping over and upsetting a colony of fifty thousand angry bees. So in those sorts of situations, at the direction of the DOHMH, we just take the hive without any attempt to enlighten the former owner. Then there are beehives placed on rooftops of buildings with clear signage that warns to stay off the roof. Or placed in community gardens without permission. Or on private land. There is no set formula to the rules of remov
al used by the DOHMH. The only commonality is that sometimes people act in ways that defy common sense—which itself is remarkably uncommon—and just set up shop with their beehives wherever they find a space, whether it’s legal or responsible or not.
And what becomes of those beehives? It depends. They have to be put somewhere. Inheriting a beehive in this manner sometimes is a windfall, but always, it is a responsibility and a potential liability. Whatever diseases the colony may have will probably be passed along to whatever other colonies one has nearby. The unknown hive may be aggressive and interfere with other colonies or the public. Depending on the time of the year, the value fluctuates greatly. If the bees are about to start foraging, it could be a big win for the receiving beekeeper. If they are about to settle in for the winter, the inheritance is not so valuable. There is something to be said for equipment that is well cared for and in good condition. Usually, though, in my experience, the beehives that are placed by people who do not have the good sense to get permission from the property owner are not in stellar shape. Generally when we appropriate these colonies the bees themselves are rehoused and the equipment is discarded or donated to a community garden or to whichever beekeeper is at hand and willing to haul it away—that is, if the entirety is not donated.