[Pollinator] That Buzzing Could Sweeten Tomorrow’s Tea

[Ladadams at aol.com]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/dining/26sfdine.html?scp=1&sq=that%20buzzi
ng%20could%20sweeten&st=cse

The  New York Times
March 26, 2010
That Buzzing Could Sweeten Tomorrow’s  Tea
By JAIME GROSS

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

“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.”
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