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<DIV>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/dining/26sfdine.html?scp=1&sq=that%20buzzing%20could%20sweeten&st=cse<BR><BR>The
New York Times<BR>March 26, 2010<BR>That Buzzing Could Sweeten Tomorrow’s
Tea<BR>By JAIME GROSS<BR><BR>If you spy a dark-haired woman gliding down Mission
Street, past the taquerias and bodegas, in a white, head-to-toe bee suit —
picture a hazmat suit crossed with a fencing mask — chances are it’s Cameo Wood,
en route to a beehive. Ms. Wood, the 32-year-old proprietor of the Mission
District shop Her Majesty’s Secret Beekeeper, cares for 15 hives in “borrowed
spaces” around San Francisco. These are hidden away in friends’ backyards, in a
restaurant garden, and on the roofs of government buildings and apartment
complexes.<BR><BR>Urban beekeeping, or backyard beekeeping, is taking off in a
major way in the Bay Area, as a growing brood of city dwellers is raising bees
on rooftops, patios and small plots of land; harvesting the honey; and, in some
cases, selling the yields in local shops and bakeries.<BR><BR>Ms. Wood started
beekeeping in late 2008 and is a trailblazer in this growing movement, which is
drawing a new crowd to a very old trade. At her nine-month-old shop, she sells
beeswax candles, native honey, beekeeping supplies and a $200 starter kit that
includes a two-tier cypress hive with a shiny copper roof. Since the shop opened
last July, she has sold 130 kits and 450 pounds of bees, and hosted 21
beginner-level classes. In October 2009, she started a meet-up club, the San
Francisco Urban Beekeeping Group, which attracts up to 60 attendees at each
gathering.<BR><BR>Paul Koski, a retired schoolteacher and the current secretary
of the San Francisco Beekeepers Association, a club that promotes responsible
urban beekeeping, estimates that in 2000 there were about 50 beekeepers in the
city. Today, according to Ms. Wood, there are “at least 400.”<BR><BR>Beekeeping
is thriving in cities across the nation, from Washington to Chicago to New York
(where, on March 16, it was re-legalized). But compared with most urban areas,
San Francisco offers a particularly hospitable habitat. It has a temperate
climate, abundant plant life and legions of residents obsessed with local and
sustainable food.<BR><BR>Even better, it happens to be “one of the most
permissive places in the country to keep bees,” said Karen Peteros, a part-time
employment lawyer and a former president of the beekeepers association. “Not
only is it legal, but it’s totally unregulated — which means that as long as
your bees don’t present a public nuisance, you can keep them wherever you
want.”<BR><BR>According to Ms. Peteros, the current beekeeping boom dates to
2007, when reports of colony collapse disorder, or C.C.D. (the still-unexplained
phenomenon of honeybees disappearing en masse), hit the media, sparking interest
right around the time the local food and urban greening movement was taking
off.<BR><BR>“C.C.D. is the worst and best thing that’s happened to honeybees in
the last 50 years,” Ms. Peteros said. People saw beekeeping as “a chance to be
close to wild nature in the city and participate directly in the production of
food,” as Ms. Peteros put it. She speaks from experience: the first year she
kept a hive in her backyard, in 2006, her neighbors’ previously anemic fruit
trees produced an epic harvest. “One plum tree was so bursting, my neighbor made
plum jam for the first time,” she said. “Someone else’s apple tree was so
weighed down, its branches started breaking.”<BR><BR>On the national level,
beekeeping remains a commercial, male-dominated industry, entwined with
agribusiness, with thousands of hives trucked in to pollinate sprawling fruit
and nut orchards across the country. But in cities, among hobby-level and
sideliner beekeepers, that demographic is swiftly changing. When Mr. Koski
started attending the local bee association meetings in the early ’90s, there
were just a dozen members, “mostly middle-aged and older, mostly men,” he said.
“Now it’s a wider demographic, pretty much a cross-section of who lives in San
Francisco” — including unprecedented numbers of women.<BR><BR>What everyone has
in common, he observed, is an interest in food and sustainability, the
environment and “making the city a greener, more favorable place for humans to
live.” Last year, the association’s membership peaked at 207.<BR><BR>So, what’s
the draw? As far as urban agriculture goes, beekeeping is accessible,
inexpensive and low-maintenance, Ms. Wood said. And it “yields a rather large
and delicious reward.” Harvests vary year to year and colony to colony, but a
typical hive of 60,000 bees will produce, on average, between 40 and 60 pounds
of honey.<BR><BR>Some of that honey ends up on the shelves at Mission Pie, a
bakery and cafe in the Mission District that focuses on local, seasonal and
sustainably grown produce. Krystin Rubin, a co-owner, said the shop sells
between three and eight different varieties at any given time, each hailing from
a different neighborhood, and each with its own particular flavor, depending on
the bees’ favored foraging spots (most often groves of eucalyptus trees,
blackberry bushes or clumps of wild anise).<BR><BR>San Francisco’s newfound bee
love thrills Ms. Rubin, who attributes it to residents’ growing desire to
connect with their food sources and counterbalance increasingly high-tech
lives.<BR><BR>“There’s only so much FarmVille you can play on Facebook before
you want to grow your own real radish,” she said. “We’ve got so much contact
with the virtual world that we’re hungry to come back to earth.”<BR><FONT face=Geneva color=#000000 size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"></FONT></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>