This has to be the most amusing beekeeping story to come out of Brooklyn in at least a few weeks: A beekeeper in the gentrifying Red Hook neighborhood finds her bees returning from their foraging with strange red markings. She hunts for a source and finds her way to a Maraschino cherry factory. Mystery, whimsy, and a musing about cultural divides ensue. Susan Dominus reports for The New York Times:
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.
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 Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company over on Dikeman Street in Red Hook.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” said Ms. [Cerise] Mayo, a soft-spoken young woman who has long bee... Read more
