Beekeepers Keep the Lid On

June 21, 2009

Summer Rituals | Tending Hives

By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN

THERE were hives to inspect and honeycombs to drain, but before all that Patrick Gannon sat on a cinder block in his backyard on City Island with his 9-year-old son, Julian, and just watched the bees.

"I can't think of anything more relaxing than sitting in front of my beehive, drinking a beer, smoking a cigar, letting the bees fly," Mr. Gannon said on a recent Saturday afternoon. "And the smell. It's the most beautiful smell."

Mr. Gannon moved to City Island from Manhattan in 2003, lured by the opportunity of sailing. But after trading a sixth-story walk-up apartment for a house, Mr. Gannon decided to return to beekeeping, a hobby he had discovered as a young man in rural England.

His pastime, however, means breaking the law. His hives, like all those in New York City, are illegal, and Mr. Gannon could face thousands of dollars in fines if someone complained and the authorities took action.

Though it's almost impossible to keep a bee colony a secret, the number of New Yorkers taking the risk is growing: beehives are popping up in various neighborhoods, and seem particularly popular in Brooklyn, say those who track beekeeping.

A group called the New York City Beekeepers Association is encouraging novices: it offers classes, matches people who want to keep bees with people who have room for hives, and sells beekeeping starter kits.

The growing popularity of beekeeping may be due, in part, to reports of colony collapse — the mysterious disappearance, reported by scientists, of bees across the country. It is also considered a worthy avocation among the environmentally conscious, because bees pollinate flowers and crops as well as produce honey.

City Councilman David Yassky of Brooklyn introduced a bill this year that would legalize beekeeping. Beekeeping enthusiasts are waiting for the Council's Health Committee to schedule a hearing on it.

Mr. Yassky and Just Food, a New York group focused on hunger issues, argue that beekeeping is a legitimate form of agriculture.

Just Food is coordinating Pollinator Week — it begins Monday — in New York City to make the case for legalizing beekeeping.

The city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is charged with enforcing the ban against beekeeping, but officials there said beekeepers are pursued only when a complaint is lodged. This year, the city had received 49 complaints by Friday; officials made nine inspections and issued four summonses.

Mr. Gannon said that a fear of thousands of bees roaming across City Island was initially unsettling to some residents. But the sight of his children playing near his hives helped ease fears, and the family's first honey harvest in 2004 attracted 30 curious neighbors.

Then there is a built-in incentive for neighborly tolerance: Each summer Mr. Gannon harvests 150 to 200 pounds of honey; almost all of it is jarred and handed out as gifts.

In a demonstration of beekeeping practice, Mr. Gannon and his son filled a hive with smoke, using a bee smoker, a small device equipped with a hand pump. Smoke calms the bees, but also makes them anticipate having to abandon the hive because of fire. They gorge on honey, in preparation for a quick exit, and, like humans, they mellow out after their big meal. It makes them less likely to object when someone pokes around their home and allows Mr. Gannon to inspect the hive.

Then he rolled out his centrifuge — a large metal cylinder. It was time to extract 2009's first batch of honey from a different hive.

Mr. Gannon loaded the racks inside the centrifuge with two beeless honeycombs, then stepped back and let Julian begin spinning them with a hand crank. The honey oozed out of the combs, down the walls in the cylinder and into a reservoir at the bottom. Two young girls from the neighborhood appeared, each wanting a turn at the handle and a taste of the honey. Mr. Gannon obliged for a few minutes, then shooed them away so he could finish.

In the first few decades of the 20th century, beekeepers were far more prevalent in the city — there were even beehives inside Radio City Music Hall and atop the American Museum of Natural History. But the number of hives dwindled: An article in The New York Times in 1956 included laments from a beekeeping supplier that he did not know of a single active hive remaining in Manhattan.

The practice was officially outlawed in 1999, when honeybees were included on a health code list of more than 100 wild animals that New Yorkers could not keep, including vultures, iguanas, ferrets and even whales: they were all potential menaces. The change to the health code sparked one of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's more memorable outbursts: when a ferret owner called his weekly radio program to complain about the rule, the mayor admonished the man for "devoting your life to weasels."

The illicit status of their bees affects beekeepers in different ways. Mr. Gannon fears a crackdown the same way that the average pedestrian worries about jaywalking. But a new beekeeper named Barry, with hives on the roof of his brownstone in Clinton Hill, asked that his last name not be used.

He mentioned his new hobby to a neighbor, who seemed put off by the idea. He has not told other neighbors.

But can he keep it a secret?

"It's kind of hard," he said, "to be inconspicuous in a beekeeper's veil."

He blames his friend Amy Azzarito's "latent desire to be a farmer" for making him a beekeeper.

Ms. Azzarito, on a quest to learn more about the food she was eating, read a book called "The Urban Homestead," which included advice on growing vegetables, harnessing energy and raising animals. She ruled out various possibilities she deemed unsuitable for city living, like raising chickens. "The only thing that seemed plausible was beekeeping," she said.

The idea was spurred last summer, when Ms. Azzarito, who works for the New York Public Library, went to a honey harvest that doubled as a crowded convention of bees on the Lower East Side. Ms. Azzarito was wearing shoes that left a lot of skin exposed, so she slipped a pair of rubber gloves on her feet for protection from stings. But she was thrilled by the experience and persuaded Barry, who was one of her college professors, to put a hive on his roof.

Now, several times a month, she and Barry don mesh masks and climb a ladder to the roof to check on their roughly 40,000 bees. There have been a few stings, some tar from the roof tracked into the house, and a stir-crazy month spent assembling the hive.

But they are enthralled by their project.

"It's so different from my subway ride," Ms. Azzarito said. "It's so different from sitting in a cubicle every day."