If you think New York City was buzzing with eclecticism before you heard of Andrew Coté, you’ll think the city is downright swarming with oddities when you hear what this city slicker does for a living.
Here’s a hint: He often climbs steep fire escapes and counts A-list Hollywood celebrities among his frequent customers. Did we mention that he runs one of the biggest sting operations in the Big Apple?
Coté, a former Fulbright professor of literature and English as second language, is an urban apiculturist—a beekeeper—in a city not exactly known for its purities. There are few lush meadows filled with white wild indigo or purple coneflowers, like the quintessential venues of traditional beekeeping.
No, Coté’s bees are city dwellers. They know their way around the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens better than any veteran cab driver, although Coté’s NYC pollinators often live on rooftops like those of the UN building on First Avenue, the fabled Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue, and the Buddhist Monastery in Rockaway Park.
Naturally, the honey from these hives is named for the precincts where it was harvested. There’s Sunset Park, Corona, Staten Island, Upper East Side, and, notably, Rockaway Beach, which Coté—a global honey connoisseur and founder of Bees Without Border—calls the “best-tasting, most delectable honey” he has ever tasted. So, what makes Coté’s New York-raised bees and their honey so elite in the organic world of honey making?
Several surprising ingredients create his city-farmed collection of honeys. “Very few pesticides are sprayed in the city, unlike the suburbs, which are choked with chemicals,” points out Coté. Besides being toxic to humans, pesticides, he explains, dull the taste of nectar, which gives honey its natural sweetness.
New York is also teeming with an extraordinarily expansive melting pot of cultivated flowers, fruits, and vegetables imported by its huge and ethnically diverse population. The Afro-Caribbean neighborhoods of East Brooklyn and the city’s profusion of community gardens are translated by Coté’s bees into some rather unique honey.
“It’s a mixture not found really anywhere else in the U.S.,” says Coté.
Another contribution to the inimitable flavors of New York City-farmed honey are native flowers and established imports growing in protected areas like the Rockaway section of Gateway National Recreation Area.
Coté’s expertise in making honey in New York’s concrete jungle has prompted celebrities to hire him to install their own rooftop hives, like 32-time Emmy-nominated food expert Padma Lakshmi recently did.
Lakshmi, host and executive producer of Bravo’s popular series “Top Chef” and Hulu’s hit “Taste the Nation,” has long been turning up at Coté’s farm stand at Manhattan’s Union Square Greenmarket to snatch up his local honey. The result of the beehive he installed on her terrace, says Lakshmi, is “a wonderful dark-amber honey that I enjoy daily with my morning’s tea.”
Coté, a third-generation beekeeper who worked alongside his father when he was an apiarist for Martha Stewart, has been a beekeeper for about 20 years, and cares, on average, for about 600,000 bees around New York. Some have appeared in TV shows, including “The Blacklist,” while others have appeared in commercials, like one for Honey Nut Cheerios.
He has traveled to Ecuador, Nairobi, Cuba, Japan, and African villages along the border of the Congo to volunteer and teach his trade to new apiarists, who often go on to support their families with beekeeping.
“Honey is a cash crop that never spoils, it’s like no other,” says Coté, “and bees also help pollinate crops and keep them growing. It’s helping farmers in that way also.”
Coté, who last year authored the book “Honey and Venom: Confessions of an Urban Beekeeper,” champions the beehive “as a box of nature” that, if properly nurtured, provides “the world’s most unsung product.”
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