[Pollinator] Fwd: Fw: Those bees!

Wed Dec 1 07:52:16 PST 2010

____________________________________
 From: lstritch at fs.fed.us
To: lda at pollinator.org
Sent: 12/1/2010 4:18:52  A.M. Pacific Standard Time
Subj: Fw: Those bees!

Lawrence R. Stritch,  Ph.D.
National Botanist
USDA Forest Service - WO
Range Staff,  3S
201 14th Street, SW
Washington DC 20250
Phone  202-205-1279

----- Forwarded by Larry Stritch/WO/USDAFS on 12/01/2010 07:03 AM  ----- 
"Patti Pride"  <ppride at starpower.net>  
11/30/2010 08:45 AM       
To
"'Kristy Liercke'"  <LIERCKKX at pwcs.edu>, "'Dennis Krusac'"  
<dkrusac at fs.fed.us>, <Dpivorunas at fs.fed.us>, "'Jenny C  Taylor'" <jctaylor at fs.fed.us>, 
"'Larry Stritch-NRE-FS'"  <lstritch at fs.fed.us>, "'Sandy Frost'"  
<sfrost at fs.fed.us>, <ssamman at fs.fed.us>, "'Tamberly K  Conway'" <tkconway at fs.fed.us>, 
<lew_gorman at fws.gov>,  <Randy_Robinson at fws.gov>, "'Richard Shahan'"  
<SHAHANRA at pwcs.edu>, "'Ben Swecker'"  <SWECKEBD at pwcs.edu>, "'Thelma Redick'"  
<thelma.redick at verizon.net>, <Doug.Holy at wdc.usda.gov>,  <brodriguez at wildflower.org>,  
<ltrevino at wildflower.org>, <oxley at wildflower.org>,  <tamberly_30 at yahoo.com>  

cc
Subject
Those  bees!

November 29, 2010 
The Mystery  of the Red Bees of Red Hook 
By _SUSAN DOMINUS_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/susan_dominus/index.html?inline=nyt-per)   
Cerise Mayo expected better of her _bees_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/bees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) . She had raised 
them right, given them all the best opportunities —  acres of urban farmland 
strewn with fruits and vegetables, a bounty of natural  nectar and pollen. 
Blinded by devotion, she assumed they shared her values: a  fidelity to the 
land, to food sources free of high-fructose corn syrup and  artificial food 
coloring. 
And then this.  Her bees, the ones she had been raising in Red Hook, 
Brooklyn, and on  Governors Island since May, started coming home to their hives 
looking  suspicious. Of course, it was the foragers — the adventurers, the 
wild  _waggle dancers_ (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994276/) 
, the social networkers incessantly buzzing about their business — who  were 
showing up with mysterious stripes of color. Where there should have been  
a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs 
 was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming 
shade  of Robitussin. 
“I thought maybe it was  coming from some kind of weird tree, maybe a sumac,
” said _Ms. Mayo_ 
(http://www.etsy.com/storque/how-to/eatsy-beekeepers-honey-cornbread-8618/) , who tends seven hives for _Added Value_ 
(http://www.added-value.org/) , an education  nonprofit in Red Hook. “We were at a loss.” 
An acquaintance, only joking, suggested the unthinkable: Maybe the bees  
were hitting the juice — maraschino cherry juice, that sweet, sticky stuff  
sloshing around vats at _Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company_ 
(http://www.dellscherry.com/cherry/company.html)  over on Dikeman Street in Red Hook. 
“I didn’t want to believe it,” said Ms. Mayo, a  soft-spoken young woman 
who has long been active in the slow-food movement.  She found it 
particularly hard to believe that the bees would travel all the  way from Governors 
Island to gorge themselves on junk food. “Why would they go  to the cherry 
factory,” she said, “when there’s a lot for them to forage right  there on the 
farm?” 
It seems natural, by  now, for humans to prefer the unnatural, as if we 
ourselves had been  genetically modified to choose artificially flavored 
strawberry candy over  strawberries, or crunchy orange “cheese” puffs over a 
piece of actual cheese.  But when bees make the same choice, it feels like a 
betrayal to our sense of  how nature should work. Shouldn’t they know better? 
Or, perhaps, not know  enough to know better? 
A fellow beekeeper  sent samples of the red substance that the bees were 
producing to an  apiculturalist who works for New York State, and that expert, 
acting as a kind  of _forensic_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/forensic_science/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier)  
foodie, found the samples riddled with Red Dye No. 40, the same dye  used in 
the maraschino cherry juice. 
No  one knows for sure where the bees might have consumed the dye, but 
neighbors  of the Dell’s factory, Ms. Mayo said, reported that bees in unusually 
high  numbers were gathering nearby. 
And she  learned that Arthur Mondella, the owner of the factory, had hired 
Andrew Coté,  the leader of the _New  York City Beekeepers Association_ 
(http://www.nyc-bees.org/) , to  help find a solution. 
Mr. Mondella did  not return phone calls seeking comment, but in an 
interview, Mr. Coté said  that the bees were as great a nuisance to the factory as 
Red Dye No. 40 was to  the beekeepers. (No, Ms. Mayo was not alone: David 
Selig, another Red Hook  beekeeper, also had bees showing red.) 
“Bees will forage from any sweet liquid in their flight path for up to  
three miles,” Mr. Coté said. While he has not yet visited the factory, he said  
that the bees might be drinking from its runoff, and that solving the 
problem  “could be as easy as putting up some screens, or providing a closer 
source of  sweet nectar.” 
Could the tastiest nectar,  even close by the hives, compete with the 
charms of a liquid so abundant, so  vibrant and so cloyingly sweet? Perhaps the 
conundrum raises another  disturbing question: If the bees cannot resist 
those three qualities, what  hope do the rest of us have? 
A story of  the perils of _urban farming_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/agriculture/urban_agriculture/index.html?inlin
e=nyt-classifier) , this is also a story of the careful two-step of  
gentrification. Red Hook embodies so much of Brooklyn culture — an infatuation  
with the borough’s old ways, just so long as those do not actually impinge on  
the modish design and values. 
The  maraschino cherries that emerge from the Dell’s factory have probably 
graced  thousands of retro-chic cocktails and sundaes in Red Hook itself, or 
at least  in Williamsburg. Finding some solution to the maraschino juice 
bee crisis — to  all urban clashes of culture — is part of the project of New 
York, a wildly  creative endeavor in and of itself. 
All  summer long, friends of Ms. Mayo were forever pointing out the funny  
coincidence that her first name means “cherry” in French; as a slow-food  
advocate with the last name Mayo, she was already accustomed to such  
observations. 
Mr. Selig, who owns the  restaurant chain Rice and raises the bees as a 
hobby, was disappointed that an  entire season that should have been devoted to 
honey yielded instead a red  concoction that tasted metallic and then 
overly sweet. 
He and Ms. Mayo also fear that the bees’ feasting on the  stuff could have 
unforeseeable health effects on the hives. 
But Mr. Selig said there was something extraordinary, too,  about those 
corn-syrup-happy bees that came flying back this summer.  
“When the sun is a bit down, they glow red in  the evenings,” he said. “
They were slightly fluorescent. And it was  beautiful.” 
E-mail:  susan.dominus at nytimes.com 

Patti
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