Tasteoflocal

Video on rooftop honey

Please click on thumbnail for video.

By: Matthew P. Moll

Honeybees — or more particularly, their stingers — cause both children and adults to cower and flay.  Swelling and sometimes-fatal allergies are partly to blame.  And some object to the honeybees’  proclivity for pollinating dandelions and other weeds.

But for David Graves, these insects provide a way of life.

“The rooftops are very peaceful and calming in the morning,” said Graves, who tends to his hives early most days before he opens his stand at the farmers’ market. “The bees are quite docile and do not have the desire to sting.”

Still, he takes few chances.  To review their honey production, Graves evicts them temporarily by smoking the hives,  simulating an oncoming brush fire.   He also covers his “green is the new black” T-shirt with a white overcoat, to show the bees that he is not a predator.

On rooftops around Manhattan, Graves has 15 beehives, which pollinate parks and community gardens and produce honey.

“There are so many rooftops and abundance of flowers and trees in New York it makes sense to have hives here,” said Graves, who started his first beehive in Beckett, Mass.,  in 1985. “With Central Park, rooftop gardens and the abundance of flowers and trees this city is like a virtual orchard.”

Graves started his first hive in New York in 1997.   He bought Georgia honeybees, which were delivered by  U.S. mail.   The first one was a success, so he started looking for new hive sites.

His sign read “DO YOU HAVE A HOME FOR ME?” on the packaging used to send the bees via mail.  Graves did this to emphasize the bee’s benign nature – so innocuous they can be handled by the mailman.

Graves found many willing to donate their rooftops, but he chose only those of which he could have 24-hour access.

“I have strange hours, usually see the bees early and haven’t taken a vacation in 16 years,” said Graves, who once could not see his bees since the owners of the building left town without leaving him keys.

The venture was successful for years.  His wife, Mary, and daughter, Heather, make organically produced homemade jams, jelly and maple syrup at the Becket farm, marketing it under the label “Berkshire Berries” – and he sells the products at the farmers markets at Union Square and 77th and Columbus.  At his peak, he produced 140 pounds of rooftop honey.

Still, beekeeping has faced some of the same challenges that have afflicted farmers nationally.  Graves had 17 hives until last season.  Then he lost them all to colony collapse disorder.

Penn State’s College of Agriculture released a statement in January of 2007 said that colony collapse disorder is a significant yet “poorly understood problem.”

Pesticides, viruses, global warming, shrinking food supply (by virtue of developing more land) and expanding cell phone towers have all been cited as reasons for the loss of hives.  Colony collapse has caused significant damage to the food supply. According to the American Beekeeping Federation in 1999 Cornell University released a study that said managed honeybees hired to pollinate crops amounted to approximately $14 billion annually.

“The tendency is to call any loss of a hive colony collapse disorder,” said Dr. Jeff Pettis a USDA research leader who has studied bee health issues for 20 years. “The symptoms of CCD and other reasons for losses overlap.”

Nationwide 36 percent of worker bee colonies were lost last year.  Pettis said about one third of these losses can be attributed to colony collapse disorder.

Pettis said bee colonies collapse when there is a rapid loss of adult worker bees. Consequently,  a sufficient number of adult bees are no longer available to feed the younger bees who now outnumber them.  As a result, the colony collapses.

Graves said he believes there are a number of reasons why  – mite infestation, the overuse of pesticides, global warming and ozone to name a few – however, he also expresses the belief that scientists need to further explore the culpability of cell phone towers.

“I strongly believe cell phone towers are disrupting communication between bees and their ability to find nectar sources,” Graves said.

Pettis said living conditions in New York are unique for bees, but none of his research has concluded that cell phone towers are a factor.

“You see a great deal of CCD in remote areas where you can’t get a cell phone signal,” Pettis said. “We haven’t made the connection between cell phones and CCD.”

Currently, Pettis said, finding a link between cell phone towers and CCD are not a priority for his organization.

Graves said he continues to work to limit the expansion of cell phone towers, particularly in Beckett.