On the roof with the bees

Last week, CSB realized that one of our hives atop Doug’s brownstone was weak & unlikely to survive, and he determined that we should bring in a healthy hive from home and swap them out. So we did.
And in case you are thinking that having beehives on rooftops is the simplest thing in the world, here is what we did this morning:
• Last night CSB sealed up the healthy hive from home, so the bees would not start foraging this morning.
• We load the car with veils, smoker, new hives & a nuc.
• We drive into Manhattan. If you have never before driven with CSB as a co-pilot, you may not know that he has one abiding philosophy: “Try to make that light.” It does not matter if the light is green, yellow or red. It does not actually matter if there is a light.
• I double park outside Doug’s and we unload the hive. Someone is shooting film in the community garden next door.
• Then I drive around the corner & park in racks of quite nice striped dresses on the sidewalk, for sale at 3 for $10. How is this possible?
• We carry bees and gear up 3 flights of stairs (1 outside, 2 inside) past the ever-affable & cheerful Doug working away on thriller numero très.
• Then the tricky part: I climb up the ladder not affixed to the wall, or anything else, and kneel* over the edge of the trapdoor, while CSB – bearing the new hive (weighing about 80 pounds, full of bees eager to fly, & brood & honey) over his head, gingerly climbs the lower rungs of the ladder and passes the hive up to me, leaning as far as possible over the lip of the trapdoor. I can guide the hive through the opening but not yet lift it by its cover. Finally we have positioned it so that I can lift it from the bottom and bring it onto the roof.
• We repeat the process with the nuc containing empty frames, which is smaller and much lighter.
• Up on the roof, it is warm and the bees are flying hither and yon. CSB gently places the new hive on the stand of the weak one we are removing. We remove the cover and put on an additional deep. Then I gently peel away the blue tape and screen that were sealing the bees inside their hive. They fly out eagerly, as you would expect from anyone cooped inside on a sunny day, only more so.
• From the roof I can look down on the community garden next door with its tiled center fountain, and watch the filming in progress. There appear to be two cameramen and one woman holding a microphone; she is interviewing a man in a straw hat and a woman in overalls. No one ever looks up.
• We seal up the weak hive for transport back to the Hastings Apiary and Clinic. And wish the new hive all happiness in their new home.
• CSB goes down the ladder first. My job is to kneel by the edge of the trapdoor and hand him the weak hive, slightly less heavy than the one we brought up. As I go to lift it he reminds me that there is no bottom board, only a screen, and the cranky bees would be pleased to sting me through the screen if I give them the opportunity. This makes it harder to get purchase on the hive. But I do, and we get the old bees down the ladder, then down the 3 flights of stairs.
• We walk over to 3rd Avenue and get the car which I am happy to report was legally parked at a legal meter into which I had legally inserted 3 quarters.
• We return to Doug’s, double park, and reload the car with the old hive, the nuc and the veils and smoker.
• Because we are already uptown in Spanish Harlem and because I love molé but don’t know how to make it, I have the brilliant idea of stopping at a Mexican grocery and buying some molé in a jar. We do stop at a bodega at the top of the hill on Lexington. They have no molé but they do have several varieties of holy candles in glass: Santa Rita, El Niño Atocha, San José and Santa Eulalia. CSB is waiting in the car so I do not buy any holy candles.
• We miss the turn off for the Deegan, but that is no problem because there is a lovely park way at the upper tip of Manhattan I have never noticed before, and then we cross a moveable bridge with a two turreted houses at either end.

*Kneeling is the one thing you are absolutely not allowed to do with a faux knee.

YES WE CAN have urban bees

Above: Rooftop hives at undisclosed location translate to Let is Bee Local Honey.

One additional way Mayor Bloomberg could achieve his goal of an “environmentally sustainable 21st century city” at NO COST to the city would be to rescind the ban on honeybees (Apis melifera) in the five boroughs.
At no cost because beekeepers would be happy to set up hives on rooftops and in backyards. These bees would be happy to pollinate the one million trees that Bloomberg plans to plant in the next ten years, as well as all the existing trees and flowers. The bees would happily - and at no cost – collect nectar and pollen from the city’s greenery and produce local honey that would provide unique health benefits to all the residents of the city.
Given the current crisis in the honeybee population, and the much lamented disconnect so many urbanites have from the natural world, welcoming bees into the green pastures of NYC would signal a municipal willingness to be in the forefront of reclaiming that natural world for our urban population.

What with the rapturous response to the election of Obama, the US is now poised to regain some goodwill and credibility abroad. What better adjunct to that positive step than to align ourselves with the venerable tradition of urban beekeeping? In Paris there are beehives atop the roof of the Opera House producing over 200 pounds of honey annually; for highly inflated prices you can buy Opera honey in the gift shop downstairs and at Fauchon; the beekeeper cannot fulfill the demand. Elegant hotels keep rooftop hives to supply their guests with local honey. Beehives are a common sight in the city gardens of Berlin, where there are approximately 500 beekeepers. The Czech republic claims to have more than 50,000 beekeepers, which means that one of every 210 Czechs keeps bees; so naturally Prague is full of apiaries. In London you can find beehives atop the Bank of England, but not enough apparently, since – according to the Telegraph because of the honeybee shortage, England will run out of local honey before Christmas this year.

According to Jürgen Hans, chairman of Berlin's beekeepers' association, "Cities are ideally suited for bees.” And I concur. Advantages of urban apiaries include the lack of agricultural pesticides in the city, the warmer climate that translates to a longer collecting season for the bees, the variety of the flora, and the enormous health benefits of locally harvested honey for all those who suffer from seasonal allergies.
In fact, the economy would benefit from the diminution of sneezing, runny eyes, and congested sinuses in businesses all over the city. Because the bees collect nectar and pollen from the very plants that irritate the nasal passages and cause all that allergic misery, a teaspoon of local honey daily acts on the homeopathic principle of giving you a minute amount of that very allergen and hence immunizing your system. In the countryside people have known this for centuries and treat themselves with honey; why should not the residents of New York City have the same advantage?
With the election of Barack Obama, we have just witnessed a seismic shift in the American politic landscape and the fall of an enormous barrier. Removing honeybees from the listed of banned ‘wild animals’ in New York City would represent the fall of yet another barrier, one that separates American city dwellers from the wonders of the natural world and the flavors of homegrown honey.

Like the farmer in Breughel’s painting who plows his field undisturbed by Icarus plunging to his watery death because the wax in his feathery wings melted when he flew too close to the sun, and like the dogs in Auden’s poem going on with their doggy life, yesterday we slowly removed the honey supers from our rooftop hives.

While Wall Street was in a freefall, while Lehman Brothers disintegrated and AIG was being bailed out, while the Unemployment Bureau was offering re-training seminars to middle management analysts, while Bolivia is on the brink of Civil War and the Peace Corps has evacuated all 113 volunteers from the country (including CSB’s nephew - now about to travel the length of the Amazon by motorcycle), and while we learn from Morty Sobell (whose stepdaughter introduced my dear friend B to her current husband - but that's another story) that Julius Rosenberg really did sell secrets to the Russians and thus alter all our perceptions of the fifties, we were harvesting honey.

First CSB carefully pried apart the frames that were sealed with propolis (from the Greek pro-before and polis – city. Also called bee-glue). Then he removed each frame, shook off the bees and handed me the frame. I gently brushed off the remaining bees with our super soft bee brush, and placed each frame in a plastic bin we had acquired for just this project.
Repeat above forty times.

Since the hives are atop a four-story brownstone, and the roof is only accessible by four flights of stairs and then a steep ladder, CSB had constructed a pallet upon which he could lower the honey-laden frames (sealed inside the plastic bins so as not to drip honey all over the house) down the hatch to the bottom of the ladder. Then we carried them down all 4 flights. Each bin weighed about forty pounds (My very approximate and subjective guess. Heavier than a two year old.).

Once the honey is extracted and jarred, we will have a few pounds of wax to melt and clean and harden in old milk cartons, and it will be exactly the same as the wax Daedelus used to make the feather and wax wings for his son Icarus, for their ill-fated escape from the labyrinth at Knossos. (As we learned from Ovid in tenth grade Latin class.)