With a world awakening to the environmental, educational and economic advantages of roof-top beekeeping, it is surprising that it is illegal in New York City. Section 161.01 of the Health Code has to have been written by one of those people, familiar to beekeepers, who see a benign swarm and call for rescue from a near-death experience. The code classifies bees with animals “inclined to do harm” – bears, cougars, and alligators, not to mention binturongs, sea kraits, and zorilles. That would be amusing if a quick call to 311, the complaint line, did not put a beekeeper in jeopardy of a $2000 fine. At last, the rest of the major cities in the country can feel more sophisticated than New York. Still, the city promotes its “greening,” even if bees that do its pollination live on clandestine rooftops. Beekeeper David Graves, who has been called “the Johnny Appleseed of New York beedom,” has mentored many an urban beekeeper since 1997, when he knew of only one rooftop hive in New York. The advantage for Graves is that Manhattan is a “bear-free environment” in contrast to his apiaries in Massachusetts. He confirms that rooftop bees “work harder…(and) They’re up much earlier and work longer hours” pollinating gardens and parks – where they forage on wild bergamot, aster, sunflower, mint, goldenrod, linden trees, and even on the fresh-cut flower bouquets for sale in stalls. Graves collected 140 pounds from a rooftop hive in the Upper East Side. A film on YouTube, “NYC Bee Man,” shows him shimmying along a window ledge with a package of bees, mentoring a taxi driver, and extolling the rooftop environment for beekeeping. New York investment banker Peter Solomon harvests contentment from his rooftop bees, saying that after he works them, “Everything else in life is calm” – a nice perk in his line of work these days. John Howe first put his bees on his roof for a little peace, too, since his wife was afraid of them. Howe thinks there are at least 50 rooftop hives now in New York. Together with commercial beekeeper Andrew Coté, he has started a beekeeping “Meet-up” – a way for interested people communicating on-line to get together. i Kevan, Peter, Bees, Biology and Management, Enviroquest, Ltd, 2007, 123. Brooklyn honey. Photo by Melissa Lohman, still from her film “Rooftop Bees” At Amy Ruth’s Restaurant in Harlem, honey from chef Carl Redding’s two rooftop hives can be tasted in his spicy honey-dipped chicken. You can buy Graves’ honey, labeled by neighborhood, at farmers’ markets. How do bees navigate in a city? They do not have a way of communicating “up,” according to Peter Kevan of the University of Guelph.i He describes an experiment in which bees were trained to forage across a canyon three-quarters of a mile wide. At first the foragers flew down the canyon on one side and up the other to the feeding station, returning the same way. Eventually they learned to fly directly across the canyon and back. Kevan reports that the dance language adjusted to the shorter, more direct route. Further, he reports, bees forage at a feeding station that is behind a large building, the dance communication reflects the direction and reflects the added distance to fly around the barrier. All rooftop beekeepers have in common a dead certainty that their honey is very special indeed. Their bees may be, as well. André Lemaire, the beekeeping instructor at the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris says that the use of chemicals and management practices in agribusiness may have such an adverse effect on bees that farmers may one day have to import bees from the rooftops in the cities.

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