Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee

6. Breeding Good Citizens: All-American Insects

144 > 145 urban beekeepers dressed in full protective gear, some members of selfdescribed rescue teams, swoop in. Hooded, veiled, and gloved, looking like futuristic hazmat specialists, they swiftly coax the bees into a box and transport them away. In a few hours the spectacle is over. It’s a relatively harmless and spontaneous show that plays out like an amalgamation of the Nature Channel and a sci-fi B movie. Honeybees swarm every spring, regardless of where they live—they can exist in a manmade hive box in the suburbs or in a feral untended spherical mass on a tree limb. From some beekeepers’ perspectives, swarming is a positive sign but also a threat to be managed. It means that the hive is so robust and healthy that it has outgrown its original home. Swarming is a form of reproduction that some argue is a biological imperative protecting the greater good of the hive. Many beekeepers describe swarms as magical, and for those who haven’t seen one, hoping to see a swarm can be likened to a backyard astronomer’s search for a comet or shooting star. Both of those are fairly regular and normal natural events, but Figure 6.1. An FDNY ladder bee-swarm rescue. (Photo credited to DNAinfo.com/Patrick Hedlund) 146 > 147 human domination and social organization. Featured in Virgil’s, and subsequently Aristotle’s and Plato’s, writings and poems, bees are used as a cross-cultural metaphor, particularly to comment on Roman imperial regime building.6 Bees are situated within violence yet imbued with a moral purpose. Bees have been useful to humans as weapons, radar, and even robots. The anthropologist Jake Kosek has even gone so far as to argue that honeybees in the 21st century are “sensory prostheses” for human military interests.7 In that way honeybees are recast through technological innovation as instrumental agents ready for human use. Swarms in particular appear to be easily ready for combat, whether in theory or practice. But outside of military rhetoric, a swarm can be viewed as neutral and harmless. For example, according to expert beekeepers whom we interviewed, bees swarm when a group splits from the hive to create new hives, enabling their species to grow so the colony can reproduce itself. Reasons for swarming include overcrowding, illness, dying or aging queens, and temperate winters when food supplies run low. A swarm of bees from the perspective of a beekeeper is a nonviolent “natural” occurrence. Similarly, a radical ecocultural feminist could interpret bees as the perfect holistic and peaceable kingdom of cooperation and matriarchy. The meaning of swarming from this theoretical standpoint is based on reproduction and sustainability—the swarm just takes half the hive and leaves to make or find another queen. In this chapter we draw from the many different interpretations of the swarm, as part of the buzz—as an unpredictable mass that creates fear and hysteria, a type of collective social organization, and an instinctive occurrence or natural state of being—as we continue to follow the buzz around bees, moving from gender and sexuality to race and ethnicity. By humans, bees are characterized as “social” insects but they are also uniquely political insects. Within U.S. borders, certain bees are more welcomed than others. “Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”: Immigrants Almost all of the research we conducted took place in the New York metro area; however, in the middle of our project in the summer of 2011, Lisa Jean taught a food studies class in Southern Italy for students from the State University of New York. While there, she interviewed 148 > 149 authenticity of “discovering” them in their natural habitat, I marvel at how they seem somehow softer, fuzzier, and more vibrantly colored than their American imported sisters. Clearly I am romanticizing the bees but I am swept up. These bees are flourishing, native, and free, almost happy in their self-determined work in this beautiful Eden (see figure 6.3). Reflexively, it is clear I am caught up in the grandeur of the countryside , the Italianness of the bees, the unadorned beauty of the Piullos ’ lifestyle. Thinking back to Brooklyn I can’t help but compare my bucolic surroundings with the urban homesteading and beekeeping movement back in NYC. In this light, rooftop farming seems inauthentic and manufactured—part of a fad, or lifestyle, affectation, politics, purpose, identity, or hobby versus living...