He thought the bees might be bringing back spilled transmission fluid or antifreeze from the depots, and he advised his fellow-beekeepers not to taste any red honey until it had been tested. Bees, pets, and children have been known to sample motor fluids that contain ethylene glycol, because it tastes sweet. buses, and to a substance called ethylene glycol. In it he speculated that the red honey might be connected to the nearby service depots for M.T.A. O’Neal also keeps bees and writes a blog, Boroughbees. In the summer’s unprecedented heat, water and nectar became harder to find.Īt Added Value Farms, a public garden and composting site in Red Hook, Tim O’Neal, who teaches biology in middle school and at Brooklyn College, looked into the problem. According to David Selig, a restaurateur who began keeping bees on the roof of his Red Hook apartment building in 2006, the number of hives in the area went from about three to more than a dozen. Immediately after the Board of Health voted to lift it, the number of beekeepers multiplied. The outlaws got a kick out of defying former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had initiated the ban. A few beekeepers had evaded the ban by camouflaging their hives with faux-brick contact paper or otherwise making them blend in with the rooftops. Until March of that year, it had not been legal to keep bees in the city. Because the red bees were city bees, nobody took the sudden change in the color of their honey as a promising development. Hornets sometimes get into a hive and eat bees, honey, honeycombs, and all. Pesticides, parasites, lack of flowers and other forage, erratic weather, and disease have caused drastic declines in bee populations. Colony-collapse disorder-the decimation of entire hives-has been a worrisome problem worldwide. All of them had noticed that their honey was turning red, too. Some local beekeepers found the sight of red bees flying in the sunset strangely beautiful. As summer progressed, to add a further touch of the apocalyptic, bees returning at the end of the day to hives in Red Hook began to glow an incandescent red. In gardens, blossoms dried and withered, and the weeds by highway entrances took on the appearance of twisted wire. By July, heat reflected from the pavement had scorched the leaves of street trees, creating a false, uncolorful fall. The summer of 2010 was the hottest ever recorded in the city. Though circumstances put Mondella and the bees on opposite sides of an issue, the beekeepers still speak admiringly of him, and express regret at his unhappy end. The first small signs that all was not right with him arrived buzzing in the air. In fact, the complications in Mondella’s life that led to his demise had a minor but significant bee component. People in the beekeeping community, or their bees, had crossed paths with Mondella in 2010, less than five years before he died. One might not expect that Mondella’s death also would have saddened many of New York City’s beekeepers, but it did. Dana, the president and C.E.O., is thirty, and Dominique, the vice-president, is thirty-two. Dell’s Maraschino Cherries processes and sells nothing but cherries-about fourteen million pounds a year-from its single Red Hook factory. Their great-grandfather Arthur Mondella, senior, and their grandfather Ralph founded it in 1948. They remember him in their prayers and wish he could see how they’ve done with the business. His daughters Dana Mondella Bentz and Dominique Mondella, who run the company now, miss him every day. Up until the moment of his death, on February 24, 2015, he ran his family’s company, Dell’s Maraschino Cherries, in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.Īrthur Mondella is mourned.
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