Bee-Line to the Bronx

Last Friday I found myself on a Bronx bound 2 train headed for the Rectory of the St. Augustine Catholic church.

What was I doing taking a train to the south Bronx on a sunny afternoon in June when I should be at work? Picking up honey, what else?


As it happened the release of the NY Times article on honey coincided with the first (and earliest in his seven years of beekeeping) 2006 harvest of Roger Repohl's hives.

Flash back to last Wednesday:

Basically, I was afraid of a heavy bombardment of upper-westsiders that weekend because of the article. I knew that if I didn't have Roger's honey (as he was the closing part of the article's story) my poor weekend staff would have hell to pay. Those kind of people just won't take "the bees aren't ready yet" for and answer and I also thought that Anna might tell them to get fucked.

In a panic I called Roger and asked him, trying not to sound like the desperate wenis that I am, if he's had his first harvest yet.

I got voicemail.

I began to sweat.

Thankfully Roger called me back.

Unfortunately, he said he wouldn't be able to drive the honey down until next week. Shit! This wouldn't have been an issue if it weren't for the fact that the only person with a free automobile at Marlow was literally glued to the World Cup games in the back room and would remain so for the next six weeks.

Shit! Shit!

The only thing, it seemed at the time, was to agree to pick the honey up at the end of the week and come in at 8 AM to set up shop, call in DSL issues and then zip (in as much as you can call a 1 1/2 hour train ride zipping) up to the Bronx, zip back with the honey, taste my staff on it and then go directly to Vermont at the end of the day.

That's what they make Adderall for right?

Anyway, fast-forward a couple of days and I'm eating salad with Roger in the dining room of the church twenty feet from 4 very busy hives of bees, having secured several cases of light, early season honey.

Let me say this, Roger is really nice fucking guy. Which makes sense because he's from God's country: Southern California. I knew this already from a cheese and honey dinner that we had at Marlow last year with some of his beekeeper protege's from East NY, but still, the guy fed me salad from his garden.

Roger is such a nice guy that the whole reason he got into beekeeping was to help the people in the neighborhood (who had made gardens on the lots of all the burned-out buildings) get their plants pollenated.

After hearing some of St. Augustine's parishioners complaining about low yields from the plants that required pollination Roger first figured out that what they needed was some bees to move the pollen around and then figured out a way to talk the leader of the church (who used to be a Benedictine Monk who tended the order's bees in an orange grove) into doing something as seemingly crazy as bringing over 200,ooo bees into the South Bronx.

You wouldn't guess that there were that many bees in the two small towers of supers in the picture or that they were actually four separate colonies of bees that shared them. You also probably wouldn't guess that Roger thinks that he might get as much as 400 lbs. of honey from the bigger of the two this summer and 250 or so lbs. from the other.

I'm here to tell you that that is exactly one cubic shit-ton of honey.

Yeah.

So after lunch we tasted some avocado/eucalyptus honey that one of his proteges brought him back from L.A., talked about how awesome it is to live in Southern California (it's mostly because of all the avocado trees) and then he gave me a ride to the train.

He was on his way to the Bronx Zoo to tend to the hive of bees that they feed to the birds and I needed to get back to work and finish up all my work shit before I took off for a weekend of what amounted to more work stuff, plus hill billys.

I love my job.