Vivian Wang is a Schwarz Legal Fellow and a member of the Litigation Team at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in New York. Prior to joining NRDC, she clerked for Judge Leonard Sand on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She is a graduate of Columbia University, Oxford University, and Columbia Law School.
While working with NRDC to remove a potentially toxic bee pesticide from the market, Wang learned about the importance of bees to our ecosystem and was inspired to become a beeekper. After beekeeping in New York City was legalized in April, she helped install three hives of honeybees on NRDC's office rooftop in Chelsea. Since then, NRDC bees have been buzzing around Chelsea, pollinating the flowers and trees in neighboring green roofs and nearby parks. You can learn more about what NRDC is doing to help bees at beesafe.org.
I'm a big fan of the Living Building Challenge and green building programs that stress the importance of having buildings and homes that grow things. Have you seen lots of movement toward combining beekeeping with vegetative roofs?
There's definitely a connection between beekeeping and the growing interest in food justice and developing sustainable, local food systems. There are several community and rooftop farms in the city that combine beekeeping with farming. For example, Brooklyn Grange is a one-acre rooftop farm in Long Island City, Queens. They grow organic vegetables for local restaurants and keep bees to help pollinate their crops and to produce tasty honey. And East New York Farms in Brooklyn has hives-that's another inspiring project, because the farm serves a community that has historically lacked access to fresh food. So it's a great symbiosis. The bees help the plants thrive, and the plants provide forage for the bees.
How receptive have you found building owners are when it comes to beekeeping in the New York City area?
I've encountered both ends of the spectrum in terms of owners' receptiveness to the idea of rooftop apiaries. The owner of the Bridge Café, a restaurant in lower Manhattan, contacted a local beekeeper to get hives placed on his restaurant rooftop as soon as the beekeeping ban was lifted last spring. His chef now uses the honey in their desserts. And I recently learned that the owner of Petite Abeille (I think they have two or three locations in New York City) is thinking about getting hives - very appropriate, given the name of the restaurant!
There are also skeptical landlords who are worried about liability. What if the roof gets damaged or a tenant's kid gets stung? I think responsible beekeeping and good communication are important. Prospective beekeepers need to ensure that the location is suitable for bees-not every rooftop can accommodate hives. And some people think they can just dump bees into a hive and go on summer vacation, neglecting their bees for weeks or months on end. That's not wise in the city. The hives can get overcrowded and the bees will swarm-then you have panicking neighbors.
Any advice for people who want to work with property owners to get more involved with beekeeping?
Beekeepers can educate their neighbors and landlords about the benefits of bees. They provide honey and pollination-or, as Jonathan Swift would say, sweetness and light (though at NRDC, we prefer energy-efficient bulbs over candles). And Italian honeybees are not aggressive. They're interested in flowers, not people. They're not going to sting unless they feel threatened.
Luckily for me, NRDC was excited about placing hives on our office roof. Our executive director's sister keeps bees in Westchester and on the Upper West Side (her apiary is called Let It Bee), and she was happy to partner with NRDC. My coworkers have been really interested in the progress of our bee colonies-I keep a couple of extra bee veils in my office so that they can visit the hives with me.
What is the scientific thoughts about the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)?
Experts have not found one single cause of CCD, but most agree that it's a combination of factors-pesticide exposure weakens bees and disrupts their social system, which makes the colony more susceptible to parasites and pathogens. Other factors include poor nutrition and migratory stress (bees used in commercial pollination are trucked from state to state, and the bees subsist on monofloral diets because they are pollinating only one crop at a time).
NRDC's bee-related work has focused on pesticides-bees are exposed to a mixture of pesticides, miticides, and other chemicals, both applied to the field and directly to the hives. The EPA tests for the effects of single chemicals, but in reality, bees are exposed to mixtures of dozens of chemicals. And while one chemical may not kill bees outright (which means its harmful effects may not be apparent from a short-term study), that chemical may have sub-lethal, chronic effects that are very important in terms of evaluating the environmental safety of the pesticides.
What are the implications of Colony Collapse Disorder and bee die-off?
I think it's important to note that colony collapse is one phenomenon in a broader trend of pollinator decline. We're losing not only honeybees, but also native bee species, birds, and bats. This is a very troubling trend. One figure you'll hear quoted is that one in every three bites of food that we eat depends on a pollinator for production. Foods like almonds, apples, blueberries, broccoli, and cucumbers all depend on bee pollination…our summer picnic tables are going to look very different if we don't reverse this trend of bee decline. CCD has received a lot of attention because honeybees are used in commercial pollination; for example, over one million hives are trucked to California to pollinate almond crops every year. Honeybee pollination is responsible for about $15 billion in crop value in the United States alone. So bee decline has serious implications for the health of our ecosystem and food system.
Do your hives on the 12th floor roof of your Chelsea office attract a more artsy bee than, let's say, bees tended on the Upper East Side?
As every New Yorker knows, it's tough to find a good place to live-our bees have a view of the Empire State Building, so I think they're pretty spoiled on that front! And yes, I do suspect these girls (worker bees are female) are visiting the art galleries when they're not at the farmers' market in Union Square. Our rooftop honey has a bit of a kick to it-I think of it as a kind of city edginess. Sweetness with attitude.
Seriously though, honey tastes different from season to season, hive to hive. I'm learning to appreciate the nuances, just as others appreciate the subtleties of wine or coffee. The delights of honey and of watching these little bees at work, and getting to share this world with friends and coworkers, more than compensates for the stings.
Paul McGinniss, "The Green Advocate," is a columnist for www.newyorkhousemagazine.com. You can read more about green building and the sustainability movement on his blog: www.thenewyorkgreenadvocate.blogspot.com . Paul is also active in the green real estate movement and works in New York as a real estate broker and green building and renovation consultant: www.paulemcginniss.com
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