Bees In Winter: A Haiku

ball of bees cluster

around queen, snow insulates

insect body heat

Legalize It

NYC Public Hearing on Bee Code

1999 had a lot going on, but most importantly, it was the year the honeybee, fuzzy little apis mellifera, was classified by Rudi Guiliani as an animal "naturally inclined to do harm," along with pit vipers and komodo dragons, and forbidden to be kept by anyone within city limits.

This past Wednesday, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (yes, Mental Hygiene... a whole other matter in itself...) held a public hearing to discuss City Council member David Yassky's bill to remove our buzzy buddy from the dreaded list included in Article 161 of the city's Health Code. This would make beekeeping legal in NYC as early as April. (Just in time for aspiring beekeepers to take the plunge!)

There were many honeybee supporters at the hearing, and not a naysayer in sight. Even the four members of the panel seemed pro-bee. (Or at least pro-local honey.) Arborists, activists, and bee lovers spoke passionately about the virtues of the honeybee. Of the bajillion points made about how rad bees are, the following ones stuck with me:

1. Most New Yorkers have heard of the Parks Department's Million Trees initiative, with its self-explanatory goal. (At this moment, they're at 315,678.) Said million trees begin their lives as million saplings outside city limits, where they're pollinated by million bees. Most of the initiative's trees are hardwood, a species that relies heavily on all kinds of bees for pollination. These trees need bees!

2. According to The Great Pollinator Project of 2009, bee watchers recorded a total of 226 species of bees in the city. 54 species were found in the Bronx, while 58 were found in Central Park alone, and 59 in Prospect Park! It's not like we live in a bee-free zone. The honeybee's illegality is arbitrary (226 species except apis mellifera??) and disadvantageous (no local honey, fewer flowers, less food grown within city limits, polluted air, etc.)

3. The legalization of beekeeping would create more "green jobs," including what one speaker referred to as "Bee Rangers" in public parks. Oh, how I'd love to be able to call myself a Bee Ranger! (Maybe I will, informally...)

4. Like so many New Yorkers, our trees are stressed out. The cure? You guessed it: BEES!

5. This past January 21, Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, a Philly native who discovered the concept of "bee space" and invented the hives in which my bees live, would have celebrated his 200th birthday. Happy Belated Birthday, Rev!

Since the public hearing was a seeming lovefest for bees, I'd say there's a pretty good chance this stupid law will be eradicated.

But Article 161 dictates the city's policies on all animals, and much more contentious than the bee code was the debate over carriage horses in the city's parks and streets, another piece up for reconsideration. Man, was that heated. A woman in the audience shouted "Shame on you!" during somebody's speech. Without going into detail, as I am unschooled in all things horses, I will say this: I do not think carriage horses should remain on 59th Street. Just two days before the hearing I was walking on Central Park South past all the horses, with their pastel-colored carriages equipped with blankets and drivers half-heartedly suggesting rides to suspected tourists, when I passed a beautiful white equine with a big, silly, blue feather sticking up above her head. The feather must have been intended to separate that particular horse from the rest, and served its purpose: the white horse looked even more miserable than the others, seemingly aware of her forced buffoonery. I felt the kind of shared embarrassment that one experiences watching unwitting participants on reality television, particularly the young children of abhorrent "characters" (or more aptly, "spectacles.") The blue-feathered horse reminded me of a scene in Follow That Bird in which Big Bird is captured, painted blue, and stuck in a cage at the circus. (I trust at least one of you will remember this reference.) Embarrassing costumes are the very least of the carriage horses' woes. For details on the horrible tragedies involving NYC carriage horses, and to support the ban on horse-drawn carriages in NYC, click here.

The final decision on bees will be made in March... come on, New York! We're practically the only city in the world to outlaw beekeeping! We want bees!

If you haven't already, sign Just Food's petition to legalize beekeeping in NYC.

Winter Wonderland

My 29th birthday began with a snowball to the face. In a good way.

I worked on perfecting my snow angels.

I've always been bothered by their disco pants. Shouldn't they be in gowns?

Maybe I should start from the middle and move outward, then lift and repeat. It would compromise the traditional form, but the result might prove more aesthetically pleasing.

Might I revolutionize the snow angel??

Stragglers Postpone the Inevitable

As far as holidays go, Thanksgiving is relatively virtuous.


Unsullied by the tempestuous filth and debauchery of Halloween and the crazy, crowd-crushing consumerism that infects the entire month of December, Thanksgiving's focus on turkey and family seems quaint.


We call Autumn "Fall" because we envision colorful leaves becoming brittle and either falling or being swept by wind to the ground. The temperature drops, the sun becomes elusive, the once-verdant leaves blush brilliantly in a grand finale before deciding to move on. They are just visitors here.


Really, though, these visitors are being pushed out the door, having overstayed their welcome at first flush. Just as honeybee colonies ruthlessly murder their big, dumb drones when summer ends, so too do trees shed their functional flourishes when they render themselves useless.


Without enough daylight to warrant the existence of leaves, those fanciful sunlight-eaters, trees are content to remain naked throughout the coldest months to conserve as much energy as possible. So it turns out that leaves, like drones, are simultaneously necessary and superflous elements to the existence of their respective wholes.


So it is December. Still Fall until the 21st, but December nonetheless, and December is filed under "Winter." But it has been so warm here in New York City that plants are slow to die.


Trees hesitate to expel their leaves. Delicate herbs are untouched by frost, and some confused trees are even mistakenly budding!


To me, the tragedy will be that much greater when Jack Frost does draw his icy sword and indiscriminately destroy all life, old and new.

The wise ones gave up the fight months ago and pass from this season to the next with grace and delicate beauty.

When will the magnolia tree notice the low sun?

She continues to bud in blissful ignorance of the winter sky.

Hibernation Strategies

Winter is tough.

The bees are irritable and dislike visitors.

The farm is still accepting field trips, but my worm dance ("munch munch, wiggle wiggle, poop poop, soil,") feels inhibited by bulky clothes and stiff, cold limbs.

Without his bro Marley, Bosco is like Elmo without Cookie Monster...

...or Big Bird.

In an attempt to survive what promises to be another devastating NYC winter, I have picked up my knitting needles and sought out warm, bold colors in soft, fuzzy yarn.

I've begun to fantasize about plump, furry sheep waddling around me. In my daydreams, while weaving their coats between my fingers, I grab a particularly adorable sheep by the haunches and give it a quick snuggle. I shear it deftly, and am magically transported to a wonderful wool-washing parlor, insulated on the ceilings with huge knitted maps. Then, a spinning wheel just like the one in Sleeping Beauty, but without the needle, suddenly appears. I play it like a harp and expel long tufts of fiber from my fingertips. Big wood buckets soak summer berries. I immerse the soft wool. Soon, I am knitting myself a burgundy-hued cocoon.

2009 is the Year of the Bee. Will 2010 be the Year of the Sheep?

Are there any people out there that raise sheep for wool? Any spinners? I feel that it might be time to learn a new homesteading trade, (seeing how I live in Manhattan and all,) and plus...

sheep are fuzzy, too.

*"Bosco-As-Elmo" photos were costumed, staged, and taken by my kid sis Dana, seen at the summit of "Don't-Eat-The-Berry-Mountain," above.

I Heart Sun

Daylight Savings is over. In November, we "fall back" to Standard Time. We wake in darkness. In less than two months, most New Yorkers will return home from work in darkness, as well. The term "Standard" proclaims "This Is The Way It Is Supposed To Be."

This seems like one of those things that we humans impose upon ourselves for no reason, just to make our lives more difficult. (Or to satisfy somebody's secret agenda. I suspect Cheney.)

Why can't we accept that 6am in July just feels different than 6am in January? Instead, we've got to go messing with our parameters of conceptualization and all that jazz. Why must we torture ourselves with such major structural shifts in time, altering the way light-- we're talking about the SUN-- we're talking about the BIGGEST, most POWERFUL ball of FIRE in our UNIVERSE-- affects us, on such a regular basis?

A honeybee always follows light, wholeheartedly believing in the sun's ability to sustain. If a bee finds herself trapped in a glass bottle, she will likely die there, thrashing her body against the glass toward the light instead of toward the opening in the top. The bee does not abide by the logic discovered (or created) by humans. Does this make her stupider than the ugly fly, who dizzily, clumsily, ascents to freedom?

I think not.

Death of a Bumblebee

If you are a bumblebee, you can die two ways. Unlike the mid-level employee who dies at his desk and no one notices for days, dying mid-work is considered graceful in bumblebee world. A worker bee ceaselessly extracts nectar until she reaches the flower upon which her tired body will rest. When I came across this dead bumblebee in the Heather Garden at Fort Tryon, I wanted to cry. So sad, so poignant, so serene.

However, some bumblebees don't have the work ethic to die with grace. Instead, they are beaten to death by their sisters when deemed a waste of space in a space-limited hive. This raggedy drone's corpse tells of a death much more grisly than that of the worker. His fuzz has become matted and his appendages are akimbo. As they say, Ma Nature giveth and taketh away.

In Virginia Woolf's bleak but beautiful essay The Death of the Moth, she pities the insignificance of the death, and thus the life, of a single dusty-winged insect. Am I wrong, though, or do the deaths of these striped buzzers seem meaningful in some important way? They deserve weighty tombstones or bronzed statues.

Oh autumn, you're breakin' my heart. First, on a blue-skied, rusty-treed Sunday, you take my dog. You continue to expose me to various forms of loss, namely and most notably my drones, my immune system, and my summertime jubilation.

Then, you fleetingly flash your outrageous beauty right in my face, and leave me to fend off rain in the safety of my way-uptown apartment, all alone but for the fruit flies occupying my compost and beyond.

All of this tells me that I'm going to need a pretty radical Halloween costume. I've got a fever and the only cure is ridiculous clothing. The problem is, my imagination is as stunted as my wallet, which is as stunted as a six-year-old chain-smoker.

But I digress...

These autumn colors are the finale in a long celebration of life. Before we know it, it'll start all over again.

Make sure you don't miss it.

In Loving Memory of Marley

This past Sunday was my cuddly hero of a big floppy puppy's last day in this world. After 12 wonderful years on Earth, where will he go? I was taught, as I believe many of us 80's kids were taught, that all dogs go to heaven. Marley's version of heaven most likely involves his favorite activities: eating, exploring, snuggling, and sleeping. I must say, my version of heaven isn't so dissimilar from Marley's. Except that in Marley's heaven, people play maracas filled with roasted almonds, everything tastes like peanut butter and there are no pointed surfaces. Now, I don't lose it with excitement at the sound of almond hitting almond, but a few falcon butlers shaking some almond-filled maracas would certainly tickle my heavenly fancy. Plus, everyone who knows me knows of my sharp-objects-pointed-toward-my-eyeballs fear. And who doesn't like peanut butter? (Except for those with peanut allergies.) (Note the foreshadowing.) (And the parentheses.)

Fall has proven to be devastating so far, and the trees have hardly begun to shake their knees. Now, the falling leaves will only bring new meaning to losing Marley.

For a college film class, I watched a time-lapsed disintegration of a dog into the surrounding woods. The filmmaker described this act as an expression of love. At the time, I was just happy that I wasn't in the other film class that watched an extensive human autopsy, so I could kind of understand the filmmaker's desire to document his dog's return to the earth. Our act of love will be to scatter Marley's ashes with those of his loyal brother, when his time comes, on their favorite beach. (Not the one we walked them on, but the one they used to run away to, of course.)

I once drove down to a snooty country club to retrieve Marley, who'd deviously escaped with his partner in crime, Bosco. Two tennis pros hit balls across the net as Marley jumped up and intercepted. A blue-haired lady squawked, "This is my private lesson!" but they were too enamored with their silly intruder to care. Quite the charmer.

On Sunday night, I returned to the city, my eyelids exhausted by tears. Or so I thought. I got stung by one of my bees that sad day, smack dab in the middle of my forehead...which would be no biggie if I did not wake up on Monday looking like Mike Tyson's girlfriend (a term coined by Frank).

When a bee stings you, she pulls back but her stinger is barbed (!) (also, will she ever evolve?) so that the pointy poison sack detaches from her body while the stinger pumps away. Until, that is, you scrape it out with your fingernail. I did this immediately and still ended up with these horrific results:

The last time I was stung by a bee, I spent 24 hours feeling wretched in bed. I believe I have been in denial for quite some time now. I am allergic to bees.

The author of Fuzzybuzzness, allergic to bees! Such a tragedy.

2010 will be the year of the bee suit. Until then, I'll leave my little buzzers alone. Drone bodies litter the ground, and I have no desire to film their decay. Marley has transformed from a tangible being to an intangible one. 2009 winds down slowly.

Some people say photographs alter the memory to record only those specific instances. I disagree. Like the filmmaker, my photographs are an act of love, a celebration of Marley's joyful existence. They confirm my memories, rather than shape them.

When Marley got sick, I began to heartbrokenly mourn his impending loss immediately. My sister Eliza, wise beyond her 25 years, reminded me of what I wrote a few months ago:

Love the furry black poodle with the crooked teeth who wanted nothing more than to give you his paw.

Massacre of the Drones

A male drone is distinguished from a female worker bee by his bulky stature and big, dumb eyes. Compared to the girl-powered majority, he's a few crayons short of a pack. He rarely leaves the hive, gets drunk on honey he had no part in cultivating, is all but immobile and almost completely blind. Some suitor.

Around this time of year, when the temperature starts to drop and the trees start blushing, the worker bees begin a thorough decimation as methodical as it is just:

"There is, at first, no sign of menace, although the drone's worker sisters have grown increasingly testy as the nectar supply tapered off with the end of summer. The drone is, as usual, swaggering across the combs, shoving aside workers who get in his way as he heads toward the capsules of honey. But this time something is wrong. A couple of females block his path. The big fellow is surprised by this unexpected resistance. "What's going on here?" his manner says. The workers do not yield before him. Then, both females suddenly fall upon the startled drone, pummeling him, biting his fine wings, tearing at his antenna and legs, violating his macho male superiority. The carnage is underway." -The Queen Must Die, by William Longgood

The carnage is certainly underway in my hives. Drone bodies litter the ground, their googly eyes seeming to implore a desperate "WHY?" in their inertia. The air is crisp, and although the sun still beams down upon the Northeast, the workers know that winter is fast approaching. The drones, bumbling bags of sperm that they are, are no longer of use to the colony. Uselessness in a beehive is a crime punishable by death.

The massacre of the drones marks an important seasonal shift. Bountiful summer has passed, making way for autumn's last harvest before cold, dead winter stifles out all but the most hardy, adaptable life.

I've been mourning the passing of summer, the season that finds me at my happiest and most energetic, in a quiet way. After celebrating the magic of the living seasons, I now turn my attention to fall and impending winter, seasons that embody loss, death, and silence. (Do I sound too morose? Good.)

The sun has begun to sink low in the sky, casting a golden nostalgia upon every surface it touches. The shade, once an ally, has grown tired of being sought after constantly, and begins to welcome wind and dampness to its dark corners, in an attempt to fend off unwanted guests. The worker bees have begun enacting brutal revenge on their lazy brothers. The sun, the shade, the drones... the first to go in a long, long line of loss awaiting us.

Autumn is a season of change. Things are changing. What is most important, now, is to remember each day for what it is. Soon, it will lie beneath soft sheets of frost, and only memory, and love, will keep it warm.