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Farmer buzzes over NYC bees
November 13, 1997
Web posted at: 5:49 a.m. EST (1049 GMT)From Correspondent Ann Kellan
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Stashed away on rooftops, workers in New York City's newest cottage industry are as busy as bees. Honeybees, to be exact.
New York City Honey is the brainchild of David Graves, a Massachusetts beekeeper. He was in the city so often selling his wares at a farmer's market that it occurred to him to build a hive in town.
The hive sits on a secret rooftop in Manhattan.
"I don't let everybody know where it is because they're not educated in beekeeping," Graves says.
Even in Manhattan, Graves says, his bees don't have to travel far to find nectar.
"From what I've seen, there's a lot of clover on the East Side, which is very close to the location of my hive," he says. "Many rooftop gardens. Many community gardens."
Though he says his bees, flown in from Italy, are gentle, Graves wears protective clothing and approaches the hive from the rear to avoid alerting the guard bees who may fly to the hive's defense. A little smoke drives the bees back into the hive, where they gorge on honey and relax.
Graves carefully dissects the hive layer by layer, to find thousands of worker bees industriously turning nectar into honey. "I might get anywhere between 60 and 100 pounds from that one hive," Graves says.
City pollution doesn't have any effect on honey, says Stephen Tim of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
"Remember, the bees are collecting that nectar, the sugary fluid in flowers," he says. "And they're not sitting there long enough to have absorbed or collected enough of the pollutants like lead and so on."
But Tim warns both urban and rural beekeepers who harvest honey to keep the hives far from plants like rhododendrons, mountain laurel and azaleas that can make the honey bitter or even poisonous.
In an informal test on the streets of New York, tasters were asked to evaluate urban and rural honey without knowing which was which. The results were nearly unanimous in favor of the Manhattan variety.
"It was smooth and it was sweet," one taster said.
"That's really good," said another, when shown the honey she'd picked. "It's surprising."
He says there's no risk of the bees becoming a stinging city pest. "Yellow jackets and wasps are aggressive, but they're not honey bees," Graves says. "People have trouble distinguishing between the two."
But not Graves, who hopes his bees will soon have the whole town buzzing. If the fruits of his bees' labor catch on, he hopes to build more hives on more rooftops.
Related sites:
Note: Pages will open in a new browser window
- Beekeeping Home Page
- Belinda's Beekeeping Spot Hive (Home) Page
- International Bee Research Association (IBRA) Home Page
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