The Rooftop Beekeeper: A Scrappy Guide to Keeping Urban Honeybees

By Megan Paska

Join the growing number of urban beekeepers with this comprehensive guide—featuring photos, honey recipes, and more—by Brooklyn’s go-to apiarist.

Despite living in the most populous borough in New York City, Megan Paska has established herself as a sought-after, professional beekeeper. In The Rooftop Beekeeper, she shares essential advice, plus tips on how to get the most out of your honeybees.

Paska shares her own personal experiences while offering practical checklists, numbered how-tos, beautiful illustrations, and seventy-five color photographs. Covering all aspects of urban beekeeping, this book also provides readers with plenty of sweet recipes for delicious treats, tonics, and beauty products to make with home-harvested honey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781452130385

Book preview

INTRODUCTION:

How a City Girl Got Stung

Sometimes when I stop to think about the fact that I am an urban apiarist—meaning people pay me to take care of bees—it still seems a little crazy.

For one, I live in New York City, in its most populous borough, Brooklyn. It’s noisy, it’s grimy, and, at first glance, it seems like everything is covered in either pavement or an apartment tower. The concrete jungle is not exactly the backdrop one imagines as a honeybee heaven. When I got my first batch of bees on a blustery Easter morning—the buzzing package headed for my Brooklyn rooftop—I was skeptical that my new hobby made any sense. Would my bees starve? Would they get sick? Would they annoy my neighbors? But the real reason my current occupation is so strange is that for most of my life, I was afraid of bees. Terrified. When I think back to my first experience with the tiny, mighty European honeybee—a.k.a. Apis mellifera—I can say with certainty that it was not a Eureka! moment. Or at least it was not a good one. I was about six, and I was playing barefoot in a weedy field of clover and dandelion behind the apartment complex in Baltimore where I lived. I was jolted by three sudden pinpricks, which evolved into a searing, pulsating pain that engulfed my entire foot.

I ran home, crying and confused, and burst through my front door, red faced and hysterical. I didn’t know what could have caused that sort of pain, but it was certainly something devilish. But my Grandma Dorothy calmly sat me down and pointed out the stingers, which I know so well today, still lodged in the top of my foot with the telltale venom sac of a honeybee still attached. With the blunt edge of a kitchen knife, she knowingly scraped them out and anointed my plump, red foot with baking soda paste. (Scrape; never pinch, she told me. It’s the cardinal rule in removing a bee stinger, or else you’ll force more venom into your bloodstream.) In the end, my dramatic first meeting with the honeybee ended in three fatalities—the bees—and a tender, fat foot. Grandma told me that it would hurt for a while, and she was right: It was the most traumatizing thing I had experienced thus far in my short life, and that day I swore that I would never again get anywhere near those ornery things as long as I lived.

But, two decades later, there I was in Brooklyn, ordering bees from a fledgling urban bee club and building a hive on the kitchen floor of my apartment. By that point, I’d discovered that urban beekeepers were multiplying in France and the United Kingdom. And I’d learned that bees in the city have just as good a chance as anywhere else to thrive. Urban trees and overgrown lots provide enough nectar and pollen from weeds like yellow sweet clover, curled blooms of gooseneck loostrife, or yellow tufts of goldenrod not just to sustain my bees throughout the seasons but to score me some of their surplus honey. My neighbors hardly notice the busy apiary situated on the rooftop above our heads and, in fact, are reminded of its presence there only when they are gifted small jars of bee goodness in the summertime. That’s Brooklyn honey, and, in case you’re wondering, it is really good!

I get asked a lot: How did you decide to become a beekeeper? Truth be told, it took a few decades. Things started to change when I got a little older and began spending more time visiting my family’s farm, a 450-acre parcel outside of Lynchburg, Virginia. Until I was a teenager, my mom, baby sister, and I would go to the farm every summer when school let out. It was always a total alien experience; I was a Baltimore city kid through and through, but this vast, quiet place with its verdure and its kindly people grew on me. I began to think of it as a second home.

My family in Virginia had held on to a tradition that us city kin had long since abandoned. They grew and raised a significant amount of what they cooked, and they really seemed to savor it when it came time to eat it. It didn’t hurt that my Aunt Joanne was a great country cook: Most of the savory things she made were flavored with salty bacon fat rendered from the pigs the family had raised and sent off to be butchered and cured nearby. Jams and jellies were made right there in her kitchen, put up in jars, and kept in the cellar under her house until they were ready to eat. I had my first vine-ripe, homegrown tomato on an early trip to Virginia. It was shocking to me—a kid who hated tomatoes that weren’t in the form of spaghetti sauce or ketchup. They were wonderfully flavorful and juicy and not at all mealy and bland like the ones topping the fast-food burgers I was used to. But at Aunt Joanne’s house, you could find them on the kitchen table at each meal, sliced and lightly salted. I’d eat them sandwiched between two pieces of fresh baked bread with a little smear of smoky bacon grease. I never looked at a tomato the same way again. But even more important, the farm taught me to understand where my tomato came from and to realize that I was capable of making it, not just buying it.

A few years later, I signed the lease on my first house, a rustic limestone structure built for the sailmakers that worked in factories along the Jones Falls in Maryland. The house dated back to the 1840s, and it had three fireplaces and wooden plank floors. It was wonderfully old and dank. You could feel the spirits of generations of transplanted Appalachian mill workers emanating from the worn wood floors and plaster walls. But what I reveled in most was the sunny private backyard and the opportunity to grow food for real. I wanted more than just a couple of tomatoes and some herbs in containers; I wanted to stop buying substandard produce from supermarkets, save money, and be more like my Aunt Joanne. So I grew okra, lettuce, peas, peppers, summer and winter squash, tomatoes, and herbs in varieties that I had never seen or tasted before. I was surprised at how successful it was and how at ease I felt working outdoors.

Once I began harvesting vegetables, I had to figure out what to do with them. This was challenging: I still felt like an inexperienced cook, and after spending weeks coddling my kale as it was growing in the ground, I didn’t want to ruin it. So I started relying on recipe books that my mother always had around but never really used. The Joy of Cooking, Fannie Farmer Cookbook . . . you know, old-school cookbooks. I’d spent time as a child lying on the floor dreamily flipping through pages of these like they were teen magazines, and now I was finally putting them to use. And once I got comfortable with my old-school kitchen skills, I started to wing it.

What does all that have to do with bees? In the garden, I’d started to notice that certain crops, like my butternuts, had different flowers. Male flowers with longer stalks didn’t end up producing fruit, but the female flowers closer to the vine would wither and a small bulb—the start of a squash!—would appear in their place. But, I noticed, this would only happen if an insect, maybe a bee, had visited a male flower first, coating themselves with the vibrant dust we call pollen before inadvertently transferring it to a female blossom. I started to pay attention to similar crops, the ones that rely on pollination to produce: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, berries, cucumbers, melons. . . . As a garden-obsessed adult, I’d finally accepted that bees weren’t actually vicious at all, largely because I hadn’t been stung since that first time. The bees kept to themselves, resolutely bound to their eternal task of finding food. I stayed out of their way; they stayed out of mine. As a result, I got over my bee anxiety, and I could appreciate them from a distance. And I began to wonder, where have all the honeybees gone? Why am I not seeing as many as I remember running away from as a kid?

I wouldn’t have an answer to that complicated question for years. Especially because my next hobby wasn’t bees, but home brewing. But life, as it so happens, has a funny way of sometimes bringing the right path to you even if you are too oblivious to head down it on your own. As it happens, I was drinking homemade beer and eating cheap pizza with some other nerds at a home brew meet-up in the back of a liquor store in the boondocks, and I met a beekeeper who made his own mead, or honey wine, from the liquid gold harvested from his very own apiary. That’s really cool, I thought. And then I sampled it, reluctantly. It wasn’t the saccharine swill I was expecting based on an earlier sample in high school, when I jokingly referenced Beowulf while choking down the overly sweet, astringent liquid. This man’s mead was a different kind of beast altogether. It was made from the cured nectar of bees who fed from the tulip poplar tree. It was sweet, yes, but it was also berrylike, even juicy. I had to know more.

I picked this beekeeper’s brain over those bad pepperoni and cheese slices, starting with mead but quickly turning to his second craft—managing stacked boxes of those flying, venomous insects that still freaked me out. I had never understood just how interesting bees were until he started dropping knowledge for me. Finally, visibly agitated with my endless barrage of questions, he suggested that I sign up for a short course on beekeeping offered at the nature center just down the road from where we were drinking beer.

That winter I enrolled. It was a four-session, twelve-hour beginner’s course—one night a week—taught by the state apiary inspector. I learned the ins and outs of keeping a beehive; honeybee anatomy; procuring a package, the name for a complete set of bees that arrives at your doorstep; and, the most exciting part to me at the time, harvesting the honey. Even though I wondered how I would feel about them when I was finally stung again—which is inevitable for a beekeeper—in the spring, I decided I would keep some bees of my own upon the stone wall that surrounded my garden. I could see them floating from bloom to bloom, pollinating my vegetable garden and doubling my harvests. But just when I began to game plan, I was offered a job in New York City. It was unexpected but, like most people, I jumped at the chance to try a different life on for size. I traded in my shovel and trowel for a MetroCard and a messenger bag and headed off to the big city.

My transition to living in an even bigger city went pretty smoothly, at least at first. I had a good job working for a small company in a trendy part of Manhattan. I landed a great apartment in an up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhood. I made enough money that I could drink overpriced cocktails and artisan-crafted beer at hipster bars and eat at all of my favorite restaurants every night of the week. By all accounts I was living the life, but some kind of void left me staring at my ceiling in bed each night wondering what in the hell I was doing with myself. Work, spend, sleep. Work, spend, sleep. It was a routine that really clashed with my conscience. In the largest, most populous city in the country, I managed to feel disconnected from the world.

In an attempt to fix what felt broken in my life, I ended up doing what most sensible people do in my position: I thought back to the time when I was the most fulfilled and hopeful. That was when I was working in the garden and growing my own food; when I had a real sense of home. Intensive gardening was a strange passion for a young person living in a city that never sleeps, but it was what I needed and, by God, I was going to have it again if it was the last thing I did.

Luckily things just sort of fell into place. The building I lived in was sold to two young women who promptly tore down the shoddy above-ground pool that had claimed our backyard. A plan coalesced: We were going to build raised beds for a garden. And they offered those of us in the building rooftop access, so we could go up and enjoy our view of midtown Manhattan across the East River. It was like the cosmos had heard my wishes. But the most serendipitous moment came a few weeks after we first planted our city crops. I was standing in line at a health food store during my lunch break, and I read an article about New Yorkers breaking the law and keeping bees. I burst through the door back at my office, beaming at my co-workers who had spent the last few months listening to me go on and on about my Brooklyn garden. Look! I said, waving the magazine. You guys won’t believe this! I’ve found my people. Beekeepers here, of all places!

I was elated, but I was still skeptical I’d ever be able to join their ranks. You’ve got to be either terribly lucky or terribly sneaky to put hives on your roof without anyone knowing or caring, I thought. I couldn’t imagine deceiving anyone and getting away with it, so I was up-front with my landlords about my plan. I was blown away when they took very little convincing, even given beekeeping’s illegality at the time. We like honey, they told me. If you say it’s safe, let’s do it! Put ’em on the roof. Even my neighbors didn’t seem to mind. Most of them were Polish immigrants, who were used to beekeeping.

I promptly started going to meetings of a local beekeeping group. People from all walks of life would come to our monthly gatherings. Some had bees, but many just wanted them. Potential apiarists would show up with questions; those who already kept bees had stories to share. It was a comfort to find myself in the company of people who didn’t find the need to have a little piece of the country in the city all that strange. A group of us got together and put in our orders for hive equipment, tools, and bees. One by one, we helped each other assemble our hives as they arrived in the form of unpainted, stacked planks of pine, all wrapped tightly with plastic.

I constructed mine with help from my boyfriend, both of us assigned the tedious task of gluing and tacking frames together on my kitchen floor. I set up the hive in my living room and imagined what it would look like with bees in it, little foragers zooming from their home, out into the world and back. I longed for my bees, and I didn’t even have them yet. This was quite a change from the bee-fearing young woman I’d been just a few years before. In fact, when my first package of bees was delivered to my doorstep by a beekeeping friend one blustery Easter morning—within it a pulsing, buzzing mass of wings and venom—I was shaking like a leaf from excitement. I hadn’t slept a wink; I couldn’t recall being that rattled by anticipation before. I gingerly carried the box up through the hatch in my roof to the empty shell that would soon be the bees’ home. The rising sun illuminated the face of the hive—bring them to me, it seemed to smile—and I felt the crackle of something magical. What I was about to do felt right.

I sprayed down the ventilated part of the box of bees with sugar syrup as I’d been taught, my hands pink and numb from early April’s chill. I took my shiny, still-virgin hive tool, and pried off the thin sheet of plywood covering the opening. I removed the queen cage and the can of syrup that had been sustaining my bees while they were in transit, and then I inverted the whole thing over my open hive. With a hearty downward swoosh, I officially began life as a beekeeper.

I’ve seen a lot and learned even more since that morning. I’ve expanded my own home apiary to three hives. I’ve started managing hives for other people, too: restaurants, urban farms, and even primetime TV shows. I’ve harvested massive quantities of honey and sold them to support my hobby. I’ve seen bees survive the winter to beget new colonies and new queens. I’ve cleaned out dead hives, misty-eyed at my failure to keep them alive. I’ve shaken swarms out of trees only to have them fly off to live in some fallen tree or brick wall. Every mistake, success, heartbreak, and victory has me more in love with the honeybee than I ever imagined I could be. I can’t even look at a photograph of a bee without welling up with affection.

Luckily my love for bees has not gone unnoticed. I’ve had the opportunity to teach introductory beekeeping classes in New York City to new legions of wanna-bees, and now I’ve been given this chance to share what I’ve learned with you and many others. Hopefully I can not only pass on some knowledge but also plant a seed of passion and affection for the magical creatures that do so much for us and ask for nothing in return except, well, to just bee.

That’s why in this book I focus on minimally invasive hive management practices. I believe that bees know more about how to be bees than we do: To my mind, facilitating their long-term survival takes precedence over increasing their usefulness as pollinators or producers of a high-value commodity like honey. This is not the way everyone keeps bees, but plenty of information about other, more-involved methods of hive maintenance already exist out there. (Some of them are listed in the Resources, page 168, in case you want to decide for yourself.) It is my opinion that the other end results of beekeeping—honey and pollination—will come on their own if your bees are hardy and resilient. It’s my goal to persuade you to grow strong bees, as many of them are not so strong these days. Honeybees are getting pummeled from all sides, from pesticides, new diseases, stress from being transported