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NEW YORK >> Cerise Mayo expected better of her bees. She had raised them right, given them all the best opportunities — acres of urban farmland strewn with fruits and vegetables, a bounty of natural nectar and pollen. Blinded by devotion, she assumed they shared her values: a fidelity to the land, to food sources free of high-fructose corn syrup and artificial food coloring.
And then this. Her bees, the ones she had been raising in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and on Governors Island since May, started coming home to their hives looking suspicious. Of course, it was the foragers — the adventurers, the wild waggle dancers, the social networkers incessantly buzzing about their business — who were showing up with mysterious stripes of color. Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.
“I thought maybe it was coming from some kind of weird tree, maybe a sumac,” said Mayo, who tends seven hives for Added Value, an education nonprofit in Red Hook. “We were at a loss.”
An acquaintance, only joking, suggested the unthinkable: Maybe the bees were hitting the juice — maraschino cherry juice, that sweet, sticky stuff sloshing around vats at the nearby Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Co.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” said Mayo, a soft-spoken young woman who has long been active in the slow-food movement.
She found it particularly difficult to believe that the bees would travel from Governors Island, a 3-mile flight, to gorge themselves on junk food.
“Why would they go to the cherry factory,” she said, “when there’s a lot for them to forage right there on the farm?”
It seems natural, by now, for humans to prefer the unnatural, as if we ourselves had been genetically modified to choose artificially flavored strawberry candy over strawberries, or crunchy orange “cheese” puffs over a piece of actual cheese. But when bees make the same choice, it feels like a betrayal to our sense of how nature should work. Shouldn’t they know better? Or, perhaps, not know enough to know better?
A fellow beekeeper sent samples of the sticky stuff to an apiculturalist, a kind of forensic foodie, who works for New York State, and he found the samples riddled with Red Dye No. 40, the same dye used in the maraschino cherry juice. Neighbors of the Dell’s factory, Mayo said, reported that bees in unusually high numbers were swarming nearby. And she learned that Arthur Mondella, the owner of the factory, had hired Andrew Cote, the leader of the New York City Beekeepers Association, to help find a solution.
In an interview, Cote said the bees were as great a nuisance to the factory as Red Dye No. 40 was to the beekeepers. (No, Mayo was not alone: David Selig, another Red Hook beekeeper, also had bees showing red.)
“Bees will forage from any sweet liquid in their flight path for up to 3 miles,” Cote noted. The solution, he added, “could be as easy as putting up some screens, or providing a closer source of sweet nectar.”
Could the tastiest nectar, even close by the hives, compete with the charms of a liquid so abundant, so vibrant and so cloyingly sweet? Perhaps the conundrum raises another disturbing question: If the bees cannot resist those three qualities, what hope do the rest of us have?
A story of the perils of urban farming, this is also a story of the careful two-step of gentrification. Red Hook embodies so much of Brooklyn culture — an infatuation with the borough’s old ways, just so long as those do not actually impinge on the modish design and values. The maraschino cherries that emerge from Dell’s factory have probably graced thousands of retro-chic cocktails and sundaes in Red Hook itself. Finding some solution to the maraschino juice bee crisis — to all urban clashes of culture — is part of the project of New York, a wildly creative endeavor in and of itself.
Selig, who owns the restaurant chain Rice and raises the bees as a hobby, was disappointed that an entire season that should have been devoted to honey yielded instead a red concoction that tasted metallic and then overly sweet. He and Mayo express concern that the bees’ feasting on the stuff could have unforeseeable health effects on the hives.
But Selig said there was something extraordinary, too, about those corn-syrup-happy bees that came flying back this summer.
“When the sun is a bit down, they glow red in the evenings,” he said. “They were slightly fluorescent. And it was beautiful.”
