Post 9: Red honey

At 2PM, Red Hook, Brooklyn bakes in the unusually warm autumn afternoon. Brownstones squat shoulder to shoulder and project their gritty soap light, slow moving barges tan the Hudson like alligator skin. If there was a word to blow the city’s hot reek from the page to your nose, I would find it; the acrid, sulfuric daytime stench mitigated only by the galloping breeze. The population finds themselves vying for shade as they fly through. A man, beneath a streetlamp, struggles with his lighter so that the scraping sli-click fails his cigar. Above the gridded streets on rooftops and awnings is where the bees in question call home. Urban beekeeping, legal in New York City since April of 2010, has been attractive to amateurs and experienced apiarists – that’s the decorative word for beekeeper – as a hobby and a livelihood respectively. Cerise Mayo has been a keeper in Red Hook and Governer’s Island since May of 2010, and still fairly new, was perplexed when she peeked into her hives that evening to discover her bees’ nectar bellies glowed amber in the sunlight, almost fluorescing. While it’s a common notion that anything can happen in New York, this was not supposed to happen.

“I thought maybe it [the ‘nectar’] was coming from some kind of weird tree, maybe a sumac,” Mayo told the New York Times. But the bees, it became apparent after the honey was sent in to an apiculturist for lab analysis, were dipping into waste from the nearby Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company. While the factory in Dikeman Street churned out sundae toppers and cocktail embellishments, the bees were churning out honey the same shade as Robitussin. Red Dye no. 40 and high fructose corn syrup pointed to the culprit, or, more correctly, the unbeknownst partner in crime. The honey tasted “metallic and overly sweet” according to similarly afflicted David Sarig. The Brooklyn Kitchen was quick to jump onto the bandwagon and offered red goo tastings to the curious gourmet anyway. Sarig, in a later interview, assured his customers that local keepers have “had contact with the cherry factory owner who has committed to better control his marinating facilities for next year, so that our bees don't consume his cherry juice next spring and summer.”

Still, Mayo and other activists of the homegrown food movement couldn’t understand why the honeybees, who had acres of urban farmland to forage from, would ever choose chemically-derived saccharides over their organic spread. Andrew Cote’, the then president of the New York City Beekeepers Association, addressed the issue saying that “bees will forage from any sweet liquid in their flight path for up to three miles,” and bees found the rouge runoff cloyingly similar – at least in taste - to nectar.