Bees Grow in Brooklyn

In the days leading up to Hurricane Irene’s New England landfall, the internet was abuzz with tweets and status updates. Citizens were warned of long grocery lines, plundered toilet paper aisles, and impending doom. The MTA was beginning to shut down the subway system, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was warning coastal residents to “get the hell off the beach.” All the while, New York City beekeepers were making last-minute preparations to protect their hives, covering them with tarps and securing their foundations.

Just last year the NYC Board of Health lifted a ban on beekeeping within city limits. Hundreds of clandestine honey lovers came out of hiding, and hundreds more put up apiaries of their own. These new hobbyists were worried about what would happen if the storm was as strong as forecasters were predicting.

Bees, once considered “wild animals” in the city, are now local residents, no longer grouped with scorpions, cobras, and cheetahs. The end of the bee ban resulted in swarms being spotted throughout the city this past spring and summer. I had seen a large number of the furry, yellow critters in Ohio last season but was surprised to find so many in the rooftop garden of my sublet in Greenpoint. I was in the process of looking for a new apartment and had been renting the place for about a week from a notable photographer. Each day I’d find some bees hovering in the butterfly bushes or morning glories. I had assumed insects like that didn’t show up much in such an inimical place as New York. I had even left a can of Deet at home, thinking mosquitos wouldn’t be a problem. I was proven wrong on both fronts. By the end of each watering escapade I was scratching at least one mosquito bite, usually more. And the bees, well, they were everywhere.

Making up only a tiny fraction of some 20,000 species of bee, honey bees evolved from a form of wasp 130 million years ago. Over the next 10 million years, the bees developed traits to help them gather pollen and nectar for their honey. They formed in colonies to stockpile their liquid gold and evolved stingers to defend it. Over millennia, changes in climate, as well as human intervention, have moved the bees from their ancestral home in Africa to habitats across the planet.

Across cultures and centuries, bees have symbolized busyness, work ethic, cooperation, and fortune. In Greek mythology, the Thriae—a trio of sister-nymph-bee-goddesses—could see into the future and read omens from the natural world. Although bees have traditionally been revered as something all but holy, in recent years their vitality has weakened considerably. Colony collapse disorder (CCD), a phenomenon whereby entire colonies of bees disappear seemingly overnight, became a global conundrum in 2006. That year record numbers of bees went missing around the world. Everything from dubious pesticides and cell phone use to disease and malnutrition has been blamed, although the cause is still unknown.

What’s known is that the disappearance of so many bees is a big problem. A single colony of honey bees can pollinate over 100,000 flowers in a day. A lot of those flowers are on edible fruits and vegetables that humans and other animals depend on to survive. In fact, one in three bites of food a person eats can be traced back to a plant pollinated by bees. Fifteen billion dollars worth of food is fertilized by the little critters every year in the United States alone. But colony numbers have dwindled so much that bees are being shipped over continents and oceans to cope with the short supply.

The past few years the media has warned that the number of bees around the world is waning. In March, the UN Environment Program released a report saying that the international bee population is declining at an alarming rate. But you wouldn’t have known it living in New York. The Friday before the storm, bees were still whizzing in and out of the black-eyed Susans at my sublet. I had become accustomed to hearing them buzzing around me. The owner of the Lorimer Street flat had asked me to water the plants once every non-rainy day. Each corner of the terrace was filled with some sort of bush or tree, so the endeavor often took me well over an hour.

That Saturday, I began to bring plants in from the balcony. The media was reporting extensively on Hurricane Irene. The news said she was “snarling,” “churning,” “barreling,” “pounding,” and “pummeling” her way to NYC. Things were said to be in “shambles” along the Lower East Coast, the forgotten country. The Lower East Side would supposedly disappear beneath “a wall of water” come Sunday morning. Battery Park and Far Rockaway would sink into New York Bay, and Coney Island would cease to exist. Politicians and reporters spoke of the apocalypse and a new Atlantis. The hydrangea bush, spruce, and large deciduous tree were the most susceptible to wind damage, so I brought them in first, laying them on a bed of towels and plastic bags set out around the living room. By the time I’d carried most of the plants inside, the once spacious apartment was like some sort of covert grow house. The couch and ottoman were no longer visible among the leaves.

The bees were flying chaotically around the porch, wondering what had happened to the orange, pink, and yellow flowers that had filled the now empty patio. Rain began to pour onto the deck and the Manhattan skyline disappeared behind a dense layer of fog. The storm was on.

Encouraged by concerned friends and family, I got out of flood-prone Greenpoint, and headed to Queens, leaving my plant brothers behind and wishing them the best. From my hotel room, I could see all of Midtown Manhattan. I watched as the clouds rolled over more and more of the city and then—well, that was pretty much it. There was some rain and a little wind, but by Sunday morning things were already looking calm again. South Queens and New Jersey got most of the flooding. The rest of the city was more or less intact.

When I returned to the sublet, I put the plants back outside and ordered Chinese food. The take-out and delivery business stops for nothing here. I ate chow mei fun and watched the last of the storm move north, revealing a bright orange setting sun. Irene had been advertised by the media as a monster, but revealed herself to be no more harmful than my departed grandmother of the same name. Half of New York was hauled up at home, surrounded by bottles of distilled water, packages of Dunk-a-roos, and cans of beer. And yet the hurricane had proved to be no more than an average thunderstorm.

And then there are the bees. One’s hovering by a marigold, another’s dead on the windowsill. I suppose that’s the reality of most things. Bees could be declining worldwide, but you’d never know it in this garden. In fact, there’s one right in front of me, and one over there. All conditions change throughout the macrocosm. Each microcosm holds a reality different from the whole. The hurricane, while destructive in the Carolinas, proved nothing much in New York. And the bees, which you’d think were near their end if you’d read the news, are busy being bees.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t look at global trends or bulletins from around the world. Being aware of something as relevant as the decline of an insect that pollinates so much of what we eat is imperative. But in the end what’s local matters most. After Hurricane Irene hit, a hive containing some 30,000 bees was rescued from a toppled tree in Fort Greene. It’s an instance such as this that have determined and will determined our future—and the future of bees. It is impractical to take all things broadcasted indiscriminately as undisputed matters of fact. For millennia, humans foraged, hunted, and dwelled in their own backyard—unaware of the rest of the earth.

The world is too big a place for each person to conquer. Our generation has been exposed to too much information and, consequently, expectations. It’s defeating to think you can change it all, and that it’s all as dire as it sounds. Take the information and be aware of it, but don’t take it too seriously. Buy some extra water before a hurricane, but don’t think just because the media declares the storm of the century, that it’s necessarily true. Grow a few extra flowers for your local honey bees or stay away from pesticides. Encourage your friends to do it too. You’ll probably find there’s a lot more bees out there than you thought.