Because 2 days is never enough.

Urban life doesn’t really accommodate some really cool DIY pursuits. Tending a vegetable garden, canning, etc… are all kind of out of reach in my one bedroom apartment. But the one out of reach hobby that really stings these days, so to speak, is beekeeping.

I adore honey; I eat it almost every morning in my yogurt. And once I started reading reports about Colony Collapse Disorder I was, naturally, pretty alarmed. Elizabeth Kolbert had a great article in the New Yorker back in August about CCD and about keeping her own bees. The article was full of all these amazing and strange facts about bees that had me riveted:

Honeybees are the only animals besides humans known to have a representational language: they convey to one another the location of food by dancing. When the queen lays an egg, she is able to choose its sex. Males, known as drones, perform no useful function except to mate. They are loutish and filthy, and the workers—sterile females—tolerate their presence for a few months a year, then systematically murder them. A single pound of clover honey represents the distilled nectar of some 8.7 million flowers. In a week, a productive hive can add seventy pounds of honey to its stores.

How could one NOT be fascinated by such creatures? She also describes the unsustainable practice in large scale agriculture of renting out large hives to pollinate often pesticide treated mono-culture crops. No wonder the bees are in trouble. Is it my moral obligation as a honey lover to try to save the bees?

So, my irrational desire to have my own apiary grew. Let’s be honest, what I really want is one that I shared with some other, more responsible people, because I probably don’t want to keep bees, like, every day. Anyway, my obsession reached a fever pitch when my friend Shana, who lives in Nevada City, California where she runs a peace education program, came to visit.

Shana is a lovely house guest and came bearing thoughtful thank you gifts. First, she gave us a bag of yummy apples from the orchard behind her house. I was so pleased, but when she pulled out a jar of honey that she harvested herself from her own hive I was so jealous I could hardly stand it. Why can’t I harvest my own honey?

My the dull ache of desire for my own bees has subsided some. I am not crazy like these people. Shana laughed at me that I’m trying live in little house on the prairie in the city. But is that really so much to ask? Can’t I be walking distance from good restaurants and subway stops and have room for bees and a vegetable garden. Is it so much to ask?