Global Swarming Honeybees: Profile of a NYC Beekeeper

2.03.2009

Profile of a NYC Beekeeper

Wending my way around the Internets on this grey and not-so-snowy morn, I came upon a gem by artist Zina Saunders: a portrait of/interview with urban beekeeper David Graves, an individual who will be familiar to anyone who spends time at the Union Square Farmer's Market here in NYC.

If you like this piece, check out the artist's amazing series on Overlooked New Yorkers. This terrific series includes portraits/interviews featuring city knights, subway musicians, bike messengers, rooftop pigeon guys, mushroom hunters, scuba divers, amateur astronomers, and many other fascinating urbanites nurturing cool obsessions.

2 comments:

HB said...: Are these your girls and boys? Do you have drones flying now?

Drones always crack me up. They have this way of cocking their head, as if to say, "You lookin' at me?; February 3, 2009 at 5:15 PM
Gerry Gomez Pearlberg said...: Nothing much is flying now, as the temperatures around my hives are in the teens. The picture is mine, but it's from the fall. I too love and appreciate drones, and always feel a little badly about the bad rap they get in the beekeeping world as "bums." I find them very charming.; February 3, 2009 at 9:52 PM

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Quotes of Note

"The cynicism that you have is not your real soul."—Yoko Ono
"The country that elected George Bush — sort of — because he seemed like he’d be more fun to have a beer with than Al Gore or John Kerry is really getting its comeuppance."—Gail Collins
"How do you inherit the earth? By being awake."—Joni Mitchell
Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form.”—Judith Coche
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."—Philip K. Dick
"A meddling beekeeper is said to be the bees' worst enemy, and this may be true."—Ormond Aebi, The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping
"For too long we have been locked in an old fashioned, reductionist approach, dealing with bees as if they were mere machines created solely for our benefit, instead of highly evolved, wild creatures, with which we are privileged to work."—Phil Chandler, The Barefoot Beekeeper
"Neither among the bees nor any other animals that have a ray of our intellect, do things happen with the precision our books record. Too many circumstances remain unknown to us."—Maurice Maeterlinck
"In these times, acceleration spoils everything."—Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Musicologist
"Whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt."—Barbara Kingsolver
"Healthy, happy bees don't need any additives."—Dee A. Lusby
"When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."—Audubon
"There is a certain valid moment for every cloud."—Paul Strand

"For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people—a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance."—Wm. Longgood, The Queen Must Die