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 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?"Bee-keeping is just one of a diverse range of 'experiments' at bridging the urban/rural divide that some New Yorkers are taking up in order to transform this city into self-made satisfying bests of city and country. The green roofs, community gardens, greenmarkets, CSAs, and neighborhood farms are softening and slowing our vasphalt hardscape, and this kind of voluntary ecosystemic circumscription makes us more humane. We slow down to make use of these places and in the process teach ourselves a lot about seasons, soil, variety so fragile it's not scalable in large commercial groceries. But particularly in the case of things like raising chickens and bees, we learn that our territorial mark will be etched in whatever goods and be[ing]s we raise up from city/country hybridity.
The Red Hook bees are a fun case because, unbounded as they are, they literally bring home to their keepers a sampling of what our ecosystem sustains.
"Hey Dad!," I picture them tweeting home, "free sugar run-off!"
Tireless and astute little fellers to get themselves to other land masses in search of the sweetest possible 'nectar' source! Just like the red sugar water we put out for hummingbirds in the suburban backyards of my youth! Of course it never occurred to me that those feverish flitters might have come to prefer this decoy stuff to our carefully-tended hibiscus, hydrangea, and passion vines. Or that we were depriving those same plants so we could birdwatch. Or that mommy and daddy hummingbirds would teach their babies to look for sugar water feeders instead of beautiful flowers--that our 'nectar' might be the font of generational addiction. gulp.
Instead, I imagined we were tricking them in some way--isn't that why the feeders needed those little plastic flowers at their base?
And so the Red Hook bees also remind us of how alike we are to the creatures we hope our urban conservation gestures will sustain.
"Trader Joe's frozen stir fry or Popeye's?" my roommate asks himself every time, no matter day or night, he passes the chicken and biscuit chain down the block, his stomach whining for the comforts of his southern childhood. It almost always comes home when he's been out late, and I get the evening's dirt in between bites of dirty rice.
I wonder whether the bees wrestle before they fly 3 miles to Governors Island instead of supping in their thoughtfully-offered flowers? i wonder whether something inside them--DNA's hard wiring, what we call 'instinct' or otherwise--signals the possible costs of their choices? Do these commuter bees that fly further for red corn syrup shorten their own lives like we speed and space-hungry Americans? And do they know it?
Fantastic second, third, fourth, and more 'natures' can come from our efforts to import country into city, and as such stay in creative ways. But the results will always be hybrids not tested in a lab, and so in plotting these plans, we ought to consider the variety in our spread-out scapes, and how they could sustain creatures who choose.
Robert Sullivan's recent New York Magazine article captures a hopeful urban adventurer's take on what the city's 'wilds' can nurture (not just metaphors!) as social and natural mingle in New York City's 'tainted' marshes, forests, canals.
His point: what other species do to maximize their 'staying' in our margins can teach us a lot about ourselves. Scarcity of many kinds is imminent, so let's let these early experiments in doing local (staying artfully) teach us how to prepare. What land do we want to survive on when we don't have the option of a 50 mile commute? What can we do now to start practicing, learning how to be?
