Hives among us

Nothing will stop urban beekeeping fanatics from making their own honey -- not traffic, not smog, not even the law.

By Lenora Todaro

Read more: Life

July 8, 2007 | "Beekeeping is a completely sensuous experience," says Roger Repohl, a beekeeper at the Genesis Community Garden behind St. Augustine's Catholic Church in the South Bronx, in New York. "You touch and taste the honey, listen to the bees hum, smell the smoke." Clad in his "vestments" -- a white beekeeper suit, veiled hat, thick canvas gloves -- he squeezes a "smoker," a bellows attached to a can that he's filled with pine needles and lighted with a match. The smoke warns the bees that the keeper is approaching to inspect the hive, but the aroma evokes Christmas. "I use pine needles," he says, "because they smell good and you might as well be an aesthete about the experience."

Repohl's hives are not the natural conical ones that inspired 1960s hairstyles, but square wood boxes stacked five high, like file cabinets, or dresser drawers. He harvests about 300 pounds of honey a year at this peaceful outpost in the middle of auto repair shops, hardware stores and a mom-and-pop slaughterhouse.

Beekeeping is illegal in New York City. The law lumps honeybees together with alligators, lions and ferrets as "wild and ferocious animals." The city's urban beekeepers, then, form an unofficial secret society of asphalt naturalists -- romantics drawn to the beauty of a beehive's intelligent design, epicureans seeking the delectable taste of locally procured honey, and off-the-grid types keeping nature alive in the city. Restrictions on beekeeping like those in New York City are uncommon, however. "Chicago has beehives on top of City Hall," says Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine. "Chicago, along with Dallas, Boston, San Francisco and Portland, actively promote beekeeping for pollinator health."

After years in which they seemed like charming throwbacks -- rooftop denizens and community gardeners procuring raw honey and making beeswax candles, tending to insects that inspire fear and awe and irritation -- beekeepers and their bees are having a moment. The current national interest in locally grown and organic food and low-impact city living is inspiring people to look into ways to have their hands in their own food production, whether by joining CSAs (community-supported agriculture), raising chickens, or keeping bees.

There are 513 beekeeping associations across the United States, according to Bee Culture magazine. Of its 12,000 readers, Flottum says, "Fifteen percent live in cities with more than 100,000 people." However, trying to put a number on how many hobbyist beekeepers there are "is like asking how many people garden," he laughs. "From our surveys, we estimate about 75,000."

Troy Fore, executive director of the American Beekeeping Federation, which provides educational programs about bees for children and scholarships for graduate students of apiculture, says he feels the increased interest in beekeeping. "The further people get from the agrarian life and the more media attention to bee losses there is, the more people say, 'Well, maybe I'll get into beekeeping.'"

This interest, coincidentally, puts urban and backyard beekeepers on the cutting edge of one of agriculture's biggest dilemmas: colony collapse disorder -- the "AIDS of bees," as Dennis vanEngelsdorp, acting state apiarist for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, puts it. VanEngelsdorp is part of the CCD research team at the University of Pennsylvania. With CCD, the honeybees, highly organized, predictable creatures with finely tuned homing instincts, leave their hives to gather pollen and never return, like sailors drifting into the Bermuda Triangle.

More than a quarter of the country's 2 million commercial bee colonies have been wiped out, according to the Apiary Inspectors of America, and the hobbyists are not necessarily immune. At stake, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is one-third, or $15 billion annually, of the food we eat -- everything from almonds and apples to cherries and pears.

Explanatory theories abound, from pesticide and pathogen to radiation from cellphone towers and the onset of the Rapture. Losses by backyard beekeepers have been estimated only anecdotally, but the beekeepers are fearful of the implications. VanEngelsdorp says "pollinators are canaries in the coal mine," and their disappearance is a referendum on the state of our environment -- a reminder of the brilliant and frightening interdependence of our ecosystem.

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Bees stroll along Repohl's neck like parrots on a friendly pirate's shoulder. He has an intimate knowledge of their ways and a knack for reading their moods. Still, he says, "Sometimes I stand there looking at them just paralyzed and I don't know what to do. It's like looking into the mind of God."

Repohl is a choir director who lives in the St. Augustine rectory in the South Bronx, providing an ecological education to local kids and sweet honey to those in the know. Each month the honey he procures takes on the flavor of the flowers in bloom: In June, linden flower; in July, clover. No bland-tasting honey pumped into supermarket plastic bears here. He's dealt with mites, but thus far has been spared CCD.

During a hive inspection, Repohl uses a tool similar to a chisel to pry open the top and assess the health of his hive. In a hive of some 60,000 bees, workers and drones, only one queen rules. Inside the honeycomb's hexagonal shapes, connected like so many votive candles, worker bees deposit pollen for making bee bread and nectar for curing honey. Deeper down in the hive we see the brood: brownish-tan in color, capped with wax from side to side indicating a strong colony. Repohl breaks open a drone pupa and the bees go to work removing the carcass, which he says they will eat. "Bees live so that the hive may survive," he says, "but bees also eat their brothers."

Repohl grew up in the San Fernando Valley, "halfway between L.A. and Disneyland." He came to the Bronx to do a Ph.D. in theology at Fordham University and befriended a former Trappist monk and master beekeeper who ran St. Augustine's Church at the time. Now, Repohl, through his workshops at Wave Hill in the North Bronx and in garden conversation, baptizes many a soul into beekeeping. During my visit, we worked while we talked, scraping propolis (a type of glue the bees create to seal the hive) from the hive frames before checking to see if the queen he'd ordered from Texas had been accepted by the hive. She hadn't. The bees were busily preparing the peanut-shaped cell for a queen of their own. In another hive, bee babies were being born, squirming in circles to push out of their eggs, arms up high, as if at the top of a roller coaster.

Norman Bantz, a Yonkers apitherapist, keeps his hives conspicuously between his door and driveway, the din of the Bronx River Parkway just yards away. The hives buzz with spring fever. At the other end of his unmanicured yard lay empty hive boxes lined with wax moth carcasses. Now in his 80s, Bantz believes that honeybee stings help treat multiple sclerosis and arthritis; he (and many other beekeepers) claim that eating raw, unpasteurized local honey banishes seasonal allergies. He began beekeeping decades ago to help one of his sons, whose allergies were so bad that he couldn't go outside to play baseball. He and his wife, married 62 years now, sting each other weekly, and he says, "I never have been in a hospital except to visit friends."

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