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The Nation's Pulse
Case of the Hives
The buzz surrounding urban farming.
As both reporter and swinging bachelor, it’s my job to keep up on what’s hip. Even if that means listening to community radio, skimming the local alternative weekly, and, on payday, stopping by the local independent coffeehouse for a bottomless cup of organic, shade grown, fair trade bean juice.
Which is where I learned that beekeeping had suddenly become hip.
I don’t mean beekeeping in the plain agricultural sense. I’m talking extreme beekeeping, beekeeping that keeps it real, beekeeping in crowded neighborhoods with lots of kids running around, beekeeping with a potential for both a good story and lots of mayhem.
My suspicions were validated last week when a certain apiculturist with the wonderful name of Wendell Watson asked one local municipality to allow beekeeping within its city limits. According to Wendell, beekeeping is all the rage. (I would have advised Wendell not to use “bees” and “rage” in the same sentence.) St. Louis, New York, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. have all jumped aboard the urban beekeeping wagon (I don’t write the metaphors, I just report them). Wendell droned on for about 20 minutes about how important honeybees are and how they get a bad rap because God gave them the ability to defend themselves, and how dogs are far more dangerous, if one is to believe Wendell’s cat.
The council decided to punt and revisit the issue at a later time, which gave me a chance to do some research. Turns out he was right about the popularity of urban beekeeping. It’s part of the burgeoning urban farm movement, which is part of the urban pioneering movement, which is no doubt part of some even greater historical movement that I am completely unaware of.
In short, it’s the idea that poor urbanites can alleviate some of their poverty and hunger by growing healthy vegetables in their little rented patches of contaminated soil instead of choking down Rally burgers every night.
The urban farmers — mostly young, white, straw-thin hipsters — frequently take over weedy abandoned lots full of broken 40-ounce beer bottles, used condoms and discarded needles, and turn them into thriving community gardens. There are two or three of these near my girlfriend’s house in south St. Louis. Urban farming is also about setting a good example for the unenlightened neighbors.
It is important to note that most of the urban poor don’t buy into this. They think the urban farmers are whacked. And the last thing most poor folk have on their mind is gardening. (The first thing is whether anybody was hit by those gunshots.)
I WENT OUT TO see Wendell’s hives for myself. Since beehives remain illegal in town, he keeps them in the backyard of a friend. Wendell’s 17-year-old daughter, Ansley, showed me around the hives. She’s the real apiculturist in the family, and has been since she was 14.
Soon we came upon two white hives swarming with Apis mellifera. “There sure are a lot of them,” I said anxiously. So many, in fact, that I had some difficulty maintaining my jaded, cynical newspaperman pose, and not running off in a panic like a pre-teen girl.
We moved in closer, as Ansley calmly slipped on her gloves and netted hat.
That’s when a bee attacked.
For some reason, he went directly for my head. I could hear him buzzing angrily in my tragically thinning hair. I’d been stung before, when I was a kid, but never in the head. I waited for the jolt of pain and for my brain to swell up the size of a watermelon.
Instead, Ansley calmly removed the bee. Talk about relieved.
A few seconds later another honeybee attacked. Or maybe it was the same militant, extremist attacker. Anyway, he was back in my hair and mad as a hornet. This one she had a harder time removing, and my cool, good-natured disposition began to unravel.
About the Author
Christopher Orlet writes from St. Louis.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (104) | Leave a comment
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Conan the Grammarian| 5.6.10 @ 8:43AM
I thought that bees were dying off in this country, being killed by some foreign parasite.
Dixie Pixie| 5.6.10 @ 5:22PM
Greetings --- Conan the Grammarian
Remember the “Africanized Honeybee Crisis”?
Well they arrived years ago and hybridized the American honeybees.
As a result the hybridized bees left for greater freedoms of the wild.
I noticed this when my plum tree was in flower and was mobbed by more than 100 honeybees.
I also knew there wasn't a beekeepers within 30 miles.
The bees are still here but are no longer under governmental control.
Smart bees.
KyMouse| 5.6.10 @ 10:04AM
I live in a semi-urban neighborhood -- quarter-acre yards -- that seems to have beekeepers. We've all received flyers asking us to be kind to the bees that visit our yards. I wonder if we'll get a discount on the honey?
Gill O’Teen ✝✡| 5.6.10 @ 10:33AM
Mr. Orlet, the major advantage of keeping bees is that the honey they produce can be used for making an ancient wine called mead. There is a great home brew shop in West St. Louis County that can help you get started in this relatively easy hobby. It’s in a shopping mall at Clayton and 141. As soon as I finish this note, I am planning to get my first batch started. Last Monday OUR Country’s Debt:GDP Ratio, using numbers available at National Debt Clock (live)http://www.usdebtclock.org, broke the 90% Armageddon barrier. By my calculations, based on these same numbers, we will strike the 100% GDP icefloe the end of next January. This is Greek economics, and the evidence of that meltdown is all over the Drudge Report. Greece is OUR future unless radical steps are taken yesterday to get OUR Country off its road to kommieville. Unfortunately, OUR conductor, his engineer and fireman were so busy reading The Teleprompter that they missed the warning sign that the bridge ahead was destroyed. Faced with a total derailment, having a self-sustaining barterable skill like producing the honey that makes the mead will be quite handy. Beekeeping is a component to this survival plan.
Gill O’Teen ✝✡
gill.Oteen07041776@gmail.com
Now is the time for all to go Galt!
Last night about 4:42 ET, OUR Debt:GDP ratio was 90.1888%
90% is considered the point of fiscal non-sustainability!
Ned| 5.6.10 @ 10:58AM
Does this mean we will start seeing commercials from mouth-pieces offering their services if you have been stung by or attacked by bees from a local hive kept on private property? After all the insurance companies insuring the private lots might have deep pockets.
Walden| 5.6.10 @ 11:09AM
Mr. Orlet - I caution you to resist the temptation to belittle home gardening, apiculture, urban gardening, or any other sort of "slow food", "local food" movement as some sort of liberal fad. I am as conservative as anyone on this web site, and am a proud home gardener. I am not an urban gardener, as I live on 12 acres in the "exurbs" and for a daytime banker actually "farm" a fairly extensive little plot. To my way of thinking, there is nothing more conservative than the rugged independence of planting one's own vegetables and watching them grow, and enjoying God's Divine Providence as he allows a man to feed himself off of the sweat of his own labor. Good day.
Jeff| 5.6.10 @ 12:05PM
I used to work on a 200 acre fruit farm.The main benifit of having bee's, is that, as they collect the pollen they move from plant to plant , germinating them so they will produce fruits and vegetables.
Adam Wade| 5.6.10 @ 12:07PM
Chris: Don't refer to the bee as a "HE". All worker bees are FEMALE. The only males in the hive are drones, whose only purpose in life is to fertilize the queens.
Eddie| 5.11.10 @ 4:01PM
Adam, I'm feelin' them drones. Fertilizin' queens is my only purpose in life.
Pat| 5.6.10 @ 1:07PM
Killer bees on the loose in your neighborhood – muggers afraid to hide among the shadows? The danger to urban dwellers are many but Democrats, from the local to the national Party level, have fallen in love with the idea of urban farming. The back to the land movement isn’t the least bit attractive to jaded and weary urban dwellers but it has an immense attraction to jaded and broke urban politicians.
Take the case of Detroit, Michigan – Detroit has more problems than a paranoid schizophrenic has imaginary enemies. Among these problems is a steadily declining population leaving about 35% of the city’s 100+ square miles deserted, vast tracts of land filled with abandoned homes, except for the occasional crack house nestled among the 1950’s era single family dwellings or 2 story flats. And Mother Nature has returned to Detroit with a vengeance – trees, shrubs and vines have wrapped leafy tendrils around empty homes creating weird, fantastic composites of man vs. nature. But, unfortunately, Mother Nature doesn’t pay property taxes, leaving the City Treasury awash in red ink.
The solution may be “urban farming” according to Detroit’s civic leaders – turn the land over to farming in all its variety, growing vegetables, dairy cows, pig farms – the possibilities are endless. Detroit’s City Fathers (and Mothers) see a way out of the property tax dilemma; a way to turn non-taxable real estate into tax generating assets. What’s the crop of choice – federal funding by the acre. Taxpayer money in the hundreds of millions will be needed to clear the land, bust up the sidewalks and streets, demolish the useless houses, returning the land to “farm ready”. Then there is the seed money providing the great-grandchildren of sharecroppers with the funds needed to resume their ancestors’ lifestyles. The happy result will be new jobs in construction, urban planning, community organizing; numerous opportunities for the bribes and other forms of corruption Detroit’s politicians both know and love.
The Motor City’s political hustlers have spent decades hanging around Washington D. C. asking the Feds for “spare change” – and they’re being ignored – everyone is used to the idea that Detroit is a permanent basket case. But urban farming has a certain psychological attraction and freshness the previous excuses lacked. Plus, Detroit will be a test case for “saving” other Democratic strongholds: Cleveland, Newark, Chicago, parts of New York City – the list is extensive. So, American taxpayers should get ready for “farm relief” in the 21st century, the media is working on your heads to plant the idea in neat rows, the urban politicians are working on new ways to raise a bumper crop of federal dollars.
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CJohnson| 5.6.10 @ 4:41PM
Colony collapse affects hives so more hives is good to gather more data and pollinate more stuff.
Use a bug zapper or CO2 system for mosquitos (skeeter eater). Don't use ANY insecticides near pollinating garden plants and fruits. Use soaps, or pyrethrin or repellent stinky marigolds/geraniums nearby and decoys. Bee's are more productive than labor unions too.
Dixie Pixie| 5.6.10 @ 5:58PM
There is a reason urban farming is a growth industry.
I have watched a great southern city and major regional manufacturing center be destroyed.
The Democratic Party and the Civil Rights Groups systematically exploited local businesses into extinction. Only the major and international cooperations had the size to survive.
As a result there green bare lots where there was productive businesses and homes.
I can look out of my office window and see whole blocks of grassland ready to be converted to farmland.
It would be except for the packs of feral children roaming the night.
The local urban farmland group had to enclose the garden plots in wrought iron fencing topped with barbed wire as the common wire fencing did not stop the feral gangs.
The Democratic Party has so mismanaged and mangled the economy our once great city's are decaying first into rural then forest land.
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