About the linked articles in the prior post concerning the maraschino cherry
packing plant in Red Hook Brooklyn, the bees, the pot bust and the
suicide....

These things happened, but they were not connected.
Further, no beekeeper was an informant, or had anything at all to do with
the bust, or the suicide.

The press reports were based upon the fabrications of a "fabulous fabulist",
who sells honey at farmers markets in NYC, and poses as a beekeeper to
everyone but other beekeepers.
He was uninvolved.

The timeline gives away the lie - the Red Hook Red Honey problem appeared
and was quietly fixed in spring/summer 2010.  The raid/drug bust/suicide
happened years later, in February 2015.  The police do not wait years before
acting on evidence, so the lag of several years proves that the "red honey"
event had no connection to the police raid years later.  

The tall tale of a connection between the events was pure fiction fabricated
by a performance artist who still pathetically stands out on street corners
in all weather hawking honey of dubious origin one jar at a time to
tourists, amazingly never ever selling out.  Thinking that one can make a
living selling honey a jar at a time is evidence of a profound lack of math
skills.  Thinking that no one would raise an eyebrow at an endless supply of
honey for sale is evidence of a profound lack of self-awareness.  But if
that is the best one can do with a life, all I can think is "there but for
the grace of God go I".


The actual story ("for the record") is nearly as interesting as the
fabrication:

In spring 2010, Dr. Yeshwant Chitalkar, who kept bees on his self-built
green roof on his home in Red Hook, noticed the Red Honey in his combs, and
quickly located the source by smelling/tasting the "nectar", and realizing
that he had passed the cherry packing plant many times when cycling, and had
seen the workers hosing the spilled red syrup from the "factory floor" into
the gutter.  He spoke with the plant manager (not the owner), and the cherry
company did not like the idea of bees getting into their open-topped tanks
(and perhaps the bottled cherries) any more than Yeshwant wanted his honey
crop contaminated.  They cooperatively sought a solution.  

The obvious fix was to put screens on the windows of the plant where there
had been none. But they did not stop hosing their spills into the gutter,
which attracted bees during the dearth, leading to the widespread
contamination of multiple Brooklyn hives, some as far north as the Brooklyn
and Manhattan Bridges.  The NYC Dept of Environmental Protection was called
in mid-summer, and they had a quite talk with the pant, explaining  that
hosing "food waste" into the public street gutter was going to pollute the
waterways via the storm drains, and threated steep fines if the "hosing"
continued.

As a community of beekeepers, we wanted to keep the story quiet, as the
inevitable "backlash" from any press coverage would be against the "elitist
hobby beekeepers", who "bullied" a local small businessman and employer of
many years into spending money to keep (yecccch!) their PET BUGS living on
their gentrified rooftops out of his food product.  Beekeeping had just been
legalized on St Patrick's Day 2010 after several years of drawn-out
slogging, and our tactic was to do exactly what I taught all of them in the
Norse Saga length "Absolutely Free Beekeeping Class" - to become invisible,
and work very hard to stay invisible.  The hard fact was that we certainly
were elitist - the fact that we had the time and disposable income to keep
bees made it that much more clear.  (I make no apologies or excuses, of
course it is "elitist" to keep bees atop literal Ivory Towers!)  

In late fall, well after the fall harvest, the performance artist wrote a
press release in cooperation with a staffer at the National Resources
Defense Council who he was dating at the time.  He self-promoted, with a
goal that still remains murky, and the NRDC fund-raised on the fabricated
claim that they had somehow been involved with a fix that was long over and
had been kept very quiet all summer.  They weren't involved in the least -
the screens had been put into place months before, and the gutters no longer
ran red with corn syrup.  But young and inexperienced interns did most of
the work at the cash-strapped New York papers at that time, and
fact-checking was never a priority in "fun" stories like those about bees.
We did not contradict or correct the inaccuracies, and continued to keep a
low profile, as the exact "backlash" we feared appeared in the "reader
comment" sections of the news websites.  Beekeepers were generally vilified,
and the multi-generation cherry packing family was glorified by their fellow
Brooklynites.

When the unfortunate search warrant/drug bust/suicide happened, years later
in 2015, I remember a NY Post article that quoted one of the investigators
saying that the search warrant was obtained on the pretext of NY Dept of
Environmental Protection detection of high-fructose corn syrup, dyed red, in
the storm sewers, indicating that the factory was STILL improperly disposing
of industrial food waste materials by washing it "down the drain".  So,
while the NYPD may have had their suspicions about pot growing/dealing, they
had only the poor factory hygiene practices as "solid evidence of any
wrongdoing to justify a search warrant" in 2015.

So, let that be a lesson learned at the cost of a life - if you are going to
do something criminal, you had better strictly follow the law and all
regulations in your "front operation".

After the suicide was reported, another press release was issued by the same
performance artist, and again the purpose of the self-promotion was unclear.
None of the beekeepers actually involved were about to contradict these new
false claims - as long as we stayed out the press ourselves, we were not
concerned about those who paint a target on their back, and we certainly
were not about to make things harder on a family that had just lost someone
to a tragedy.  We had learned early on that "the press" was not a positive
force in the effort to continue to keep bees in the midst of 11 million
tightly-packed people.  There simply was no way for them to resist
sensationalism.   But the press can always find one or two less-experienced
beekeepers to interview, as it is human nature to want to get one's picture
in the paper, if one has not thought about the consequences, or considered
the foolishness of trying to be a living oxymoron of a "famous beekeeper". 

Somewhere, I have great photos of the red syrup filled combs, and one of
Yeshwant's bees, backlit by the sun, with a crop full of the "Red Hook Red"
honey... the bee glows iridescent red.  I also took photos at our communal
spring crop extraction party of the uncapping of the contaminated frames,
which we ran very last, of course. He bottled and sold the honey as "True
Blood Honey", named after the vampire TV series of the time.  It was
inedible, terrible stuff, but everyone bought little bottles as a novelty
gag gift, and to help out a guy who had to scrap all of his honey super comb
and much of his brood comb to rid himself of the red stain of "FD&C red dye
#40" (as identified by Stephan Thomas up at the NY Ag&Mkts food lab).

The best news is that the press eventually grew tired of stories about bees
kept in unusual places by extreme personalities.  So, we can enjoy our quiet
little boxes of calm in the midst of a world gone stark raving mad in peace,
without anyone shoving a microphone or a lens at us, and without worrying
about someone inadvertently connecting our names to our faces to the places
we keep bees.

It is crucial that a low profile is maintained by anyone who is serious
about it, as we expect some eventual future incident to turn us all back
into scofflaw beekeepers, and we don't want to have to find new sites if
beekeeping is restricted/regulated/prohibited.   I don't keep bees hoping to
"save the bees", and I don't keep bees thinking I might "save the planet".
I keep bees to save the world from what I'd be if I did not keep bees.

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