> I'd be curious to know if there's ever been any honey
> analysis of City bee honey - to see if they're managing
> to avoid the Dumpsters, industrial sites, and pollution
> which seems more common than trees in NYC.
There are a few studies of interest here:
Bumblebees are said to be healthier and more prolific in urban than rural
areas.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0807
Even when present, bees forage for plant nectar, and apparently leave the
soda to the vespids.
https://doi.org/10.1093/jue/juw001
And there are more - the point here is that beekeepers who have nothing much
to say about their own products will often disparage someone else's product
in order to create a false sense of differentiation between two honeys that
may not be discernably different to the consumer's palate. (Don't get me
started on "raw honey", and "unfiltered honey" I'll break my keyboard...)
This sort of disparagement/prejudice when pointed at urban (vs rural)
settings is both deeply misinformed and persistent among those who do not
realize that modern large cities tend to be led by, and have public works
and parks departments run by aging pony-tailed hippies, and staffed by young
bearded hipsters. So, speaking for NYC, where I keep bees, insecticides and
herbicides are banned in the NYC parks. The amount of parkland is very
large, in terms of a total percentage of the footprint of the city - 28,000
acres (113 kmē) of municipal parkland. Central Park, where my bees tend to
forage, is 843 acres total. My hives are along the eastern edge of the
park, mostly on 5th Ave rooftops since I consolidated my hives.
There is a group called "Million Trees" in NYC.
They reached their goal of planting one million new trees in NYC on
11/24/2015
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/joyce-kilmer-park/dailyplant/23507
They have not stopped.
To my knowledge they have not planted any of Randy's "Saccharum
officinarum", but as it is a grass, it would provide no forage for bees,
even if it could be grown so far north.
There are also "street trees", lining both sides of most streets, many of
them replanted by the "Million Trees" group, and all of them protected by
criminal charges for vandalizing the trees. Many of them have plastic tags
with QR codes that can be scanned to tell the passer-by what kind of tree it
is. We beekeepers were able to lobby for bee-forage, even including Linden
trees, although they can drip enough nectar to make car owners who park
under them in spring a little annoyed. You can see the extent of the
"street tree planting" here, on a handy map:
https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/
Not all the trees are mapped just yet, it is a work in progress.
Industrial sites? They've all been turned into luxury loft condos. There's
so little "industry" here, aside from construction, that skateboard/bicycle
repair shops are perhaps the most "industrial" thing one can find.
Dumpsters? Yep, we got 'em, but they tend to be filled with the heavy-duty
bagged output of a compactor, as no one has space for uncompressed trash and
recycling. Bees would have a hard time getting through that bagging. Even
the natural gas pipelines in the area are pumped/pressurized by electric
pumps, rather than gas-fired pumps, as people did not like the noise of the
gas-fired pumps. So, the nearest smoke-belching anything is somewhere in
PA. That said, there are areas that are "superfund" sites from the bad old
days, such as one site in "Brownsville" East New York, where even the soil
itself is so toxic they are removing it down to a depth fitting for a
granite quarry. Not a great place for a community garden.
There still is lots of traffic, as in any city, so the low-sulfur diesel
regulations made a big difference to the overall air quality. But the
plants themselves are highly effective filters for a wide range of things
that might otherwise end up in nectar. The air quality is closely
monitored, and the data is public, but there are some specific areas, such
as between 50th St and 43rd St around Park and Lexington in the Waldorf
Astoria - Grand Central Terminal - Roosevelt Hotel area, where the odor of
overheated brake pads from all the subway trains comes up from underground
vents and makes me think "I don't ever want a beehive here". Of course all
the hotels around Grand Central just had to have bee hives in the 2007-2012
timeframe when beekeeping was briefly a fad.
Analysis? There's quite a bit done. As the market for "local honey" here
overlaps with an overtly "obsessive" fixation with health, I lot-code my
cases of honey by rooftop location, date of harvest, and colony number, and
a few of the health food stores I sell to do send samples out for analysis
to labs in NJ. There are lots of people in the flavorings business in NJ,
so there are lots of labs with HPLC/MS or at least old-skool Gas
chromatographs. We beekeepers don't tend to be large enough operations to
afford regular testing, nor is there much question among the customer base,
as they demand "local" because of its cachet of exclusivity. I easily sell
out by Christmas, every year. So does everyone else who sells their honey.
Customers are not at all price sensitive for the most part.
There was a post about PCBs found in Connecticut hive products in a Roger
Morse study - the biggest source of PCBs will be the transformers that look
like large soda cans hanging from telephone poles. They take the local
distribution voltage on your overhead wires (mostly 13.8K volts) and drop it
down to the 220 volts fed to your house. When lightning and windstorms
overload the local distribution lines, arcing can cause these transformers
to explode, and spray PCBs everywhere. So, unless you are extreme rural (no
electric service nearby at all) or extremely urban (underground electric
services where the storms can't reach it) the PCBs are a serious issue, as
they don't go away, and there's both bioaccumulation and biomagnification at
work. This is a scourge of suburbia and the exurbs and honey is the least
of the concern here. Replacing the transformers with more modern ones does
not seem to be a priority with the power companies, or the counties and
states who regulate them.
But the noun "pure honey" is conjugated like so many other metrics in
beekeeping - "My honey is utterly pure", "Your honey may have an issue",
"His honey is questionable", "Their honey is toxic".
In stark contrast, my artist friends somehow co-exist, often competing for
the same limited pool of art-buying dollars without disparaging each other,
or each other's art, or arguing over differences in technique. It's
refreshing to speak with them. They never heckle each other. Not even from
the safety of a computer screen, far away.
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