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Of Bees and Men

The Chicago Honey Co-op draws sweet sustenance from a once-barren West Side lot.

Monday Jun 02, 2008.     By Sharon Hoyer

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Michael Thompson possesses the gentle temperament of a man with a gift for handling thousands of stinging insects and savoring the writings of Proust. As we amble across the expanse of jagged concrete, he gives me some background on his apiary. The Latinate term (for bee farm, not monkey house) comes off a bit too stuffy for this bare-bones operation, consisting solely of land and hives; there's no electricity, no plumbing, and the only amenity is a small tool shed alongside the freight line that encloses the north end of the lot. Yet the dignity of the word is not entirely inappropriate. The scattering of white, rectangular hives on the cracked pavement is reminiscent of a small European city, bounded by a patch of farm on the west and the towering (by comparison) Sears building, with its arched windows and dormant smokestack—evocative of governance and industry—on the east. The lot, on the corner of Fillmore and Central Park Avenues, held the Sears Roebuck warehouse back in the heyday of mail-order catalog shopping, but lay fallow since the warehouse was demolished—that is until five years ago, when Thompson proposed to fill an acre of the space with bee hives and community gardens. The owners immediately granted him use of the land for a token pittance. Now this once-barren space contains dozens of hives, each producing 40 or more pounds of honey each year.

The honey—some of the tastiest you can find—is harvested and packaged by the Chicago Honey Co-op, which then sells the wares at the Green City Market and a handful of independent vendors. The health benefits of honey are age-old and storied: it's a powerful anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial agent; it kills bacteria, helps heal wounds and is known to alleviate asthma symptoms. Eating locally produced honey can ease seasonal allergies. Studies are currently underway to determine if honey can relieve the ravaging side effects of chemotherapy. But the crop, beneficial and delicious as it may be, is somewhat peripheral to the mission here; the statement of purpose on the CHC website is "to provide job-training opportunities to the underemployed while operating a small-business model that is dedicated to sustainable agricultural principles." Michael tells me one of the reasons he chose the North Lawndale neighborhood was to reach out to people recently released from prison. The bee farm runs on casually organized volunteers—many of them high school students—who stop in, learn a bit about beekeeping and do whatever chores need to be done. The Co-op also occasionally offers beekeeping courses to adults and teens interested in setting up hives of their own.

One of the Co-op members has brought a handful of her students to tour the apiary. I watch as she outfits the young ecologists, who look to be around seven years old, in netted hats and sturdy gloves before gearing up myself. It turns out that netting children is a slow process, so I chat with Michael as he fills a smoker with wood chips and newspaper. The smoker is a simple device—essentially a tin can with a bellows attached—used to sedate bees in times of stress. "I think we should use it," Michael says, "since there are so many people around." I internally marvel that the bees are sensitive to crowds, like cats or babies.

The intelligence of bees is pretty remarkable. In social colonies like these, scout bees seek out food sources then return to the hive and report their findings with a series of movements scientists have adorably named the "waggle dance." This dance indicates the location of food sources in geometric relationship to the sun. All the gatherers are female; the males have one job: mate with the queen, who lays between 1,000 and 3,000 eggs each day. The gestation period from egg to larva to pupa to adult, worker bee is 21 days. Worker bees, depending on how hard they work, live about 6 weeks or more. The queen can live up to five years. According to some quick mental math, this adds up to a lot of bees.

There's a question I want to ask, but it somehow feels insensitive or gauche. "Did you lose many bees last year?" I ask delicately, referring to the sudden decline in bee populations—dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder—as though discussing a recently deceased relative. "About half the population," Michael says in a low, even tone. I can't tell if he's peeved or pained (or neither) by the question.

"Do they know what caused it?"

"No. Nobody knows. I get scientific publications on bees and no one has the answer. What it comes down to is agriculture is hard. But," he says, bending over to administer a few gentle puffs of smoke into the entrance of a hive, "we'll try it again this year."

The kids are suited up and we get our first peek inside the teeming hive. The bees, and the children, are surprisingly calm. It's a cool day, so Michael doesn't keep the lid off too long; hives are kept at a constant 92 degrees year round by the trembling of tens of thousands of tiny wings. However, we do get to sample late-summer-of-2007 honey straight from the comb. Apparently, this honey isn't the very best produced at the Co-op; that version will be showing up sometime in late June, when bees are feeding on white sweet clover and linden trees. Nonetheless, the young ecologists and I find the honey before us quite satisfactory and pinch off dainty chunks of the sweet goo with increasing gusto. The Co-op is officially out of honey for now; as I lick my fingertips I think that June can't come soon enough.

It took a move from the regimented lawnscapes of the suburbs to the congestion of a major metropolis for Sharon to look twice at what she puts in the trash, down the sink and into her own body. She reports fortnightly on her endeavors to change "greening" from calculated deviation to a practicable way of life. You can contact her here.