Buzz

Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee

Lisa Jean Moore, Mary Kosut

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781479874330
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner, 2014 Distinguished Scholarship Award presented by the Animals & Society section of the American Sociological Association Bees are essential for human survival—one-third of all food on American dining tables depends on the labor of bees. Beyond pollination, the very idea of the bee is ubiquitous in our culture: we can feel buzzed; we can create buzz; we have worker bees, drones, and Queen bees; we establish collectives and even have communities that share a hive-mind. In Buzz, authors Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut convincingly argue that the power of bees goes beyond the food cycle, bees are our mascots, our models, and, unlike any other insect, are both feared and revered. In this fascinating account, Moore and Kosut travel into the land of urban beekeeping in New York City, where raising bees has become all the rage. We follow them as they climb up on rooftops, attend beekeeping workshops and honey festivals, and even put on full-body beekeeping suits and open up the hives. In the process, we meet a passionate, dedicated, and eclectic group of urban beekeepers who tend to their brood with an emotional and ecological connection that many find restorative and empowering. Kosut and Moore also interview professional beekeepers and many others who tend to their bees for their all-important production of a food staple: honey. The artisanal food shops that are so popular in Brooklyn are a perfect place to sell not just honey, but all manner of goods: soaps, candles, beeswax, beauty products, and even bee pollen. Buzz also examines media representations of bees, such as children’s books, films, and consumer culture, bringing to light the reciprocal way in which the bee and our idea of the bee inform one another. Partly an ethnographic investigation and partly a meditation on the very nature of human/insect relations, Moore and Kosut argue that how we define, visualize, and interact with bees clearly reflects our changing social and ecological landscape, pointing to how we conceive of and create culture, and how, in essence, we create ourselves.

1

Catching the Buzz

Introduction

As long-term New York City residents, neither of us would consider ourselves to be huge animal lovers or nature enthusiasts. We go on occasional hikes or camping trips to escape the city, but there is always something strangely comforting about driving back into the metropolis and feeling the energy of the city—the architecture, the noises, and the people. We have both been shelter-pet owners at different stages of our lives and while trying to provide our pets with the best homes possible, there was a clear and sharp division between humans and animals: “no dogs on the bed.”

As sociologists, we are invigorated when we find ourselves immersed in human subcultures where seemingly “abnormal” things happen. We like to watch members of our species pushing their bodies beyond their limits, resisting social expectations through creative problem solving—forcing us to reconsider the everyday taken-for-granted ways of life. Our previous research projects were not very engaged with animals. Mary’s work interrogates artworlds, particularly how and why humans create things that come to be viewed as art and the difficulties working artists endure in the process of getting critical and economic recognition, as well as practices of body modification, from tattooing to more extreme procedures. These field sites appeal to her because they speak to the creative impulses of our species, and exploring practices and behaviors deemed to be “deviant” or “outsider” provoke us to reflect on conventional and habitual ways of being in the world. On the other hand, Lisa Jean’s work focuses on human bodies in biomedical, sexual, or reproductive situations. With studies about human sperm to child sex predation to female genital anatomy and safer sex practices, her scholarship is also decidedly humancentric. Her research and projects have all examined human bodies as essential to the shape and functioning of social life. She has shown that while some bodies are highly visible others are not represented at all, with important consequences for social action and policy. In short, we know how to research humans sociologically. So for this project, we began with people.

In late 2008 through early 2009, as both of us were coming off of other scholarly projects, we began to notice the growth and intersection of do-it-yourself (DIY) urban communities, urban homesteading movements, and back-to-the-land postcollege internships. We live in Brooklyn, which is perhaps ground zero for DIY cultures; it also is a commerce-driven area that emphasizes the anti-brand or the one-of-a-kind object. Many of our former students from Purchase College seemed to follow a path of either moving to Brooklyn and getting involved in some cooperative living arrangement that involved gardening, bartering, or crafting or moving to some tristate-area farm for a lowly paid internship with organic farmers. Just as this postcollegiate shift was happening, we began to notice and hear a lot about bees. As collective artisanal beer brewing, knitting, mushroom foraging, and bread baking became points of reference while socializing, beekeeping became all the rage.

The local cultural zeitgeist seemed to pivot around quirky hands-on activities and esoteric knowledge. The act (and craft) of beekeeping if you will—nurturing teeming boxes of insects, dressing in protective gear that could be mistaken for kitsch Devo spacesuits, and harvesting “homemade” jars of honey—fits effortlessly among other eccentric eco-activities. As part of the larger 99 percent, beekeepers, rooftop farmers, and DIY crafters alike acquire a particular kind of cultural capital, a term the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used to describe networks of social relationships where cultural knowledge itself becomes a source of power and status. This type of oppositional cultural capital also offers a tangible corrective to a pop media landscape where spray-tanned, bedazzled, and shopaholic twentysomethings dominate. As the surreal and widely popular consumer orgy climaxed on the cable show Jersey Shore, locally owned bars and coffee shops in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and in the Riverside section of the Bronx hosted events organized through Facebook for knitting circles and beer brewing. Urban beekeeping overlapped with much of what we had been noticing—a shift toward bringing the “natural” into the urban, so that young people could learn a craft or a skill that seemed somehow nostalgic and lost, thereby bonding and socializing over shared interests in a seemingly disparate urban landscape and a larger cultural mediascape “gone wild.”

Making our work known in our social lives, friends, or friends of friends, who had decided to keep bees started approaching us with increasing frequency. We sampled the growing array of local honey sold at the farmers’ markets and compared the beeswax candles that adorned the Brooklyn Flea booth. We heard a lot of stories about bees, from news reports on Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) to anecdotes about swarms at local spots. In short, we tingled with the buzz over bees. Like a contact high, that experience of being sober but feeling altered when surrounded by others who are chemically affected, we were catching a buzz from other people and from the bees. This buzz, a rhythmic and hypnotic sensation, an emotional and physical shift in our consciousness, resounded throughout our research journey and percusses through this book.

We wanted to learn about the beekeepers themselves, their interactions with each other, how they are part of various craft and green DIY movements, and, of course, their relationships to their bees. Who were these fellow urbanites that took on the hobby of raising bees? What motivated them? How did they become proficient? What was the phenomenology of keeping bees? We discovered that New York City bee-keepers are a pleasantly motley crew of people, embodying different personal styles, political perspectives, and manners of beekeeping. The one feature that connected them was their role as the bees’ stewards—they were earnest, serious, and deeply committed to their bees.

In order to learn about the practice of beekeeping and gain entry into the world of urban beekeepers, in January 2010 we enrolled in a six-month class on urban beekeeping at the Central Park Arsenal. As two novices with limited animal/insect husbandry experience, we were introduced to a part of the burgeoning New York beekeeping world and to a larger community of people who are attracted to and participate in urban homesteading and the greening of city rooftops and backyards. Jim Fischer of New York City Beekeeping led the biweekly classes, which each consisted of a two- to three-hour comprehensive PowerPoint presentation and an extensive question-and-answer period. We were quickly swept up in Fischer’s sharp wit and engaged lecturing style. Always wearing a bee-themed t-shirt, Jim, a fiftyish man with gray, curly hair, became more than an instructor. Over time, he became an invaluable informant, taking us on site visits to Van Cortlandt Park or Randall’s Island in his aging Volvo station wagon. Putting us in mind of a favorite uncle, he shared warmth and wisdom. He is generous with his vast knowledge and at the same time not reserved about his strong opinions of proper bee care based in science. Part of the New Alchemy Institute in the 1970s, he worked on ecological innovations in hydroponics, aquaculture, and wind power. A beekeeper for more than twenty years, before recently moving to New York City, Fischer had six hundred hives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Fischer combines a folksy astonishment with “big city ways” with the honed expertise of a professional and compassionate beekeeper.

Being a beekeeping student was a role we both looked forward to, as full-time professors accustomed to taking center stage in a classroom. But we were at the same time students and ethnographic researchers—the classroom as field site is a complicated social space to investigate. Our practice of simultaneously taking notes about bees combined with learning how to become a beekeeper, while also attempting a sociological meta-level analysis of who was in the room and thinking about their concerns and connections to other humans and European honeybees, was a challenge. We wanted to learn the language of bee care, understand the creatures’ habits through human translations and mediations (as the bees were absent and not speaking for themselves), and at the same time get a sense of the humans who surrounded us. After six months, we had acquired some basic bee biology and beekeeping knowledge, as well as a developing sociological sketch of the human participants.

Classes began in January and usually took place on Sunday mornings that were unusually icy, windy, and frigid. Undeterred, about eighty to one hundred enthusiastic novice and seasoned beekeepers braved the weather alongside us until spring arrived, as did the bees. We were so impressed with Jim Fischer’s dynamic, thorough, entertaining, and engaged lectures, that we received a grant from Purchase College, where we teach, to invite him to give a presentation entitled “Pollen Nation,” attended by over 150 students and college faculty. This lecture was part of our efforts to institute a native pollinator plot at Purchase College, where we established solitary bee tubes in the spring of 2011. Our project was fueled by Purchase College’s commitment to sustainability and the continuation of an on-campus garden that included common plants that attract bees. Our grant added a sustainable native bee garden plot to Purchase’s campus community garden. Our plot and the placement of bees could encourage the growth and proliferation of “citizen scientists” at the undergraduate level. This plot would enable the Purchase community—faculty, staff, and students—to be part of larger National Citizen Scientists Projects as outlined by the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign or by more local organizations like the Great Pollinator Project. Citizen scientists conduct bee censuses after identifying the species of bee that is present.

However, our proposal was met with some trepidation among the members of the funding committee. Before we were to receive funding, we had to answer questions such as “How many bees are on campus?” and “What are the risks of increased bee stings due to the plot?” The fear of bees looked to be an impediment to our securing the funds. The types of questions we were asked contained, what we felt was, a degree of unanswerable panic that administrators (and others) commonly conjecture. We wrote detailed responses in hopes that we could allay fears that could prevent funding and support.¹ The difficulties we had setting up this simple garden plot really speak to how bees can instigate fear, whether they are “killer” bees or just mason or leafcutter bees. Commonly found in gardens and considered friendly or nonaggressive to humans, leafcutter bees are not described as social (as is the case with honeybees) because they make individual nest cells for their larvae, rather than within a hive. They can be introduced in gardens in cardboard tubes, what some refer to as bee hotels. The solitary bee tubes we brought into the garden are pictured in figure 1.1. The bees assimilated onto campus uneventfully and no stings were reported, administrative concerns notwithstanding. The experience of setting up these hotels gave us a productive pause, realizing just how comfortable we were feeling around bees and how familiar these insects had become to us. They were not a flying “other” who may be dodgy or even hazardous, but bees, creatures that share our space and whom we are mindful of. Although it was plainly obvious that many humans did not share our point of view—because, for them, bees are stinging insects first and foremost—we discovered bee fear as well as bee love.

Figure 1.1. Solitary bee tubes at the Purchase College Garden. (Photo credit: Mary Kosut)

In addition to our beekeeping classes and bringing bees to campus, we also attended supplemental lectures by noted bee scientists such as the entomologist Thomas Seeley, who spoke on the topic of “Honeybee Democracy: How Bees Choose a Home.” We were trained as Citizen Scientists at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for the Great Pollinator Project in the summer of 2010 and participated in an online bee census. We attended lectures on basic beekeeping at Brooklyn Brainary and Eagle Street Farms, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Brainary is a type of urban DIY educational collective where members of the public can take classes on crafting, cooking, and special topics within the arts and sciences. The lecture we attended was on a new movement called “backwards beekeeping,” a phrase coined by a charismatic L.A. beekeeper named Kirk Anderson. Both Anderson and Sam Comfort of Anarchist Apiaries in the Hudson Valley discussed noninvasive and natural approaches to beekeeping based on their experiences in urban and rural settings. Comfort, though very different from Jim Fischer, became another of our primary informants. Comfort is charismatic, like Fischer, but is more wry, even playful. He is a self-described anarchist but has a Zen quality and easy nature that suggests an accessible anarchy. Comfort, very serious about his politics, presents his radical ideas about capitalism and argues that “most bees are in a welfare state.” He is in his early thirties but has a sartorial style that subverts any one particular look that may symbolically indicate a place for him within “normal” adult professional life. Comfort’s clothes appear to be literally thrown on his body without looking—he is so unfashionable that he is stylish. Comfort has bee tattoos on his arms, his hair is permanently overgrown and messy, and he prefers going shoeless, advocating barefoot beekeeping.

He welcomed us into his home (a roomy two-story farmhouse filled with instruments and ephemera he shares with other young homesteaders) and his hives in upstate New York, socialized with us in Brooklyn, and explained his complete devotion to the bees in great detail. Like Fischer, Comfort has vast experience with different beekeeping practices and a fascinating biography. While he went to college for art, Comfort has a nine-year beekeeping history, starting out as a commercial beekeeper in Montana, then trucking bees to the almond fields of California and to the Pacific Northwest to pollinate cherries. After working in commercial beekeeping for four years he found that while beekeepers do all they can to keep bees alive, “monoculture is not conducive to bees’ health” and “there is no young blood in the industry, no money in it, and nobody wants to get stung.” Comfort has been treatment-free (not using antibiotics or pesticides) for six years and tends four hundred hives up and down the East Coast.

In the Field: Hive Checks and Human/Insect Participant Observation

In the summer of 2011, we visited Eagle Street Farms, a large rooftop vegetable farm in an industrial building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, adjacent to the East River, on a number of occasions, to hear public lectures by Annie Novak, Meg Paska, Tim O’Neal, Sam Comfort, and other beekeepers. At public lectures, all beekeepers discussed the idiosyncratic aspects of tending bees in New York City, encouraging interested attendees to jump in and give it a try themselves. Joining Fischer and Comfort as our key informants on urban beekeeping, Meg Paska has experience beekeeping in several boroughs of the city. A redheaded twentysomething, usually dressed in a uniform of denim baggy overalls, Paska is also one of the innovators of urban homesteading—keeping chickens, gardening, and building a community of urban naturalists. Warm and funny, Paska is seriously committed to bees and has made a career as a beekeeper, for herself and others, and is also a blogger and writer working on a book about bees. Coming to beekeeping through beer-brewing workshops and an interest in creating a self-sustaining business model, Paska shared recipes with us for making mead, propolis tinctures, and beauty treatments while her rambunctious chickens trampled around the mini-farm she tended in her modest Greenpoint backyard.

We also had the pleasure of participating in hive inspections at Added Value Red Hook Community farm (also in Brooklyn), which is a large plot of land about the size of a city block that serves as a vehicle for encouraging city kids and young people to become involved in a hands-on community project. Added Value invites them to discover and appreciate the natural world in a neighborhood that is otherwise filled with housing projects and commercial development. Added Value is within a block of the new IKEA store on the waterfront, an unlikely juxtaposition of green space and landscapes of consumption.

Because we were interested in learning more about beekeeping in rural environments, in May 2011, we visited Comfort’s Anarchist Apiaries, which is situated on a small collective farm and includes bee yards in other locales in Germantown, New York, about sixty miles from the city. We participated in Beekeeping Bootcamp, which included total immersion in the field (including trekking through many muddy fields that swallowed and dislodged our shoes). This weekend consisted of meeting fellow beekeepers interested in Sam’s top bar hives and a noninvasive approach to beekeeping. We had our share of handling bees and managing hive expansion (including getting stung a number of times) and hearing from other beekeepers about their practices. Figure 1.2 is from this field visit. Here, Lisa Jean, with hive tool in hand, handles a top bar hive loaded with active bees and honey.

Figure 1.2. Sam Comfort’s Beekeeping Bootcamp in the Upper Hudson Valley. (Photo credit: Mary Kosut)

Through the three-year period of our research we visited hives in Brooklyn (in the neighborhoods of Boerum Hill, Crown Heights, Flat-bush, Bushwick, and Red Hook), in Manhattan (on Randall’s Island and on the Lower East Side), and in the Bronx (at Van Cortlandt Park). We also had the opportunity to interview a beekeeping family in Southern Italy. We interviewed more than thirty urban beekeepers, from novices to seasoned beekeepers with over twenty years of experience. We interviewed hobbyists, urban homesteaders, and those who had been employed in industrial beekeeping.

Attending special events like the Inaugural New York City Honey Fest in Rockaway Beach (September 2011) and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s “Bee-Day” Party in Prospect Park (June 2010) enabled us to witness how the culture of beekeeping has become integrated into the vibrant street-festival life of New York. At both of these events, curious members of the public attended workshops, participated in honey tastings, and observed live bees at work on their combs. We were struck by the interest and enthusiasm for bees—from how pollen can be used to cure ailments to legislation calling for New York State honey regulations—as well as the diverse ages of the attendees, including families and young adults. Such events speak to the increase in the popularity of bees, and how bees have become more visible in urban environments. Of course, bees have always thrived in New York City, but they were relatively invisible to those outside of the beekeeping community until a few years ago.

We also participated in numerous hive inspections. This allowed us not only to learn the basics of hive maintenance but also to observe the divergent ways that people “keep” bees and how they interact with them. We quickly found out that while there are common tasks to be performed, such as checking to see if bees are healthy and have enough space to live, each beekeeper has his or her own philosophical and emotional relationship with the bees. In this context, each inspection we did was colored by the beekeeper, who set the tone and the rhythm for our encou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Catching the Buzz
• 2. Buzzing for Bees
• 3. Saving the Bees
• 4. Being with Bees
• 5. Entangling with Bees
• 6. Breeding Good Citizens
• 7. Deploying Bees
• 8. Becoming Bee Centered
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors