[The owner of the factory Arthur] Mondella did not return phone calls seeking comment....That was 2010. Last Tuesday, "Mr. Mondella, 57, shot and killed himself in his office bathroom just as city investigators were discovering that a marijuana farm lay beneath the factory." That link goes to the NYT, which took me to the Red Bees of Red Hook story with the line "The most controversy the factory had attracted before this came several years ago, when local bees began turning red after feasting on the cherry liquid."
“Bees will forage from any sweet liquid in their flight path for up to three miles,” [said Andrew Coté, the leader of the New York City Beekeepers Association]. While he has not yet visited the factory, he said that the bees might be drinking from its runoff.... Could the tastiest nectar, even close by the hives, compete with the charms of a liquid so abundant, so vibrant and so cloyingly sweet? Perhaps the conundrum raises another disturbing question: If the bees cannot resist those three qualities, what hope do the rest of us have?
A story of the perils of urban farming, this is also a story of the careful two-step of gentrification....
(I linked to The Daily Mail's story in a short post yesterday.)
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18 comments:
Life in the Big City, where bee hives ooze an alarming shade of Robitussin.
I am impressed they have bees at all. What happens to your Mini House that bees mistake for a hive.
Bees need the liquid and pot plants need the pollen. Win-win.
What self-respecting apiarist lives in Brooklyn
I remember reading a book about this along time ago - A Bee Glows in Brooklyn.
Marijuana use is directly linked to increased suicide rates, so why is anyone surprised that this leftard druggie ate a bullet? It was just a matter of time.
One should check out the Wiki entry for maraschino cherries. Too many noxious chemicals -- sulphur dioxide and calcium chloride specifically -- are involved for those things to be considered entirely wholesome. I've always regarded them as rather nasty, and whenever one has been offered I have usually managed to discretely dispose of it.
I had a girlfriend up in Montreal who obsessed over those things -- and lychees, she had to have those too. Yuck.
After making a career of messing up perfectly good cherries and perfectly innocent bees I'm not surprised by the pot and the self-slaughter.
"The time the marijuana-growing, suicide-committing, cherry-factory-owner turned the local bees red."
He's the poster child for the next millennium!
These people, it's no mystery where they come from. You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire, you build egos the size of cathedrals, fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse, grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own god, and where can you go from there?
And as we're scrambling from one deal to the next, who's got his eye on the planet? As the air thickens, the water sours, and even the bees honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity.
And it just keeps coming, faster and faster. There's no chance to think, to prepare. It's buy futures, sell futures, when there is no future!
We got a runaway train boy, we got a billion Artie Mondellas all jogging into the future. Every one of 'em getting ready to fist-fuck god's ex-planet, lick their fingers clean as they reach out toward their pristine, cybernetic keyboards to total up their fuckin' billable hours.
And then it hits home! You gotta pay your own way, Artie. It's a little late in the game to buy out now! Your belly's too full, your dick is sore, your eyes are bloodshot, and you're screaming for someone to help! But guess what? There's no one there! You're all alone, Artie. You're god's special little creature. Maybe it's true, maybe god threw the dice once too often. Maybe he let us all down.
Nice troll madisonfella. Should get an award
LOL! Your memory is better than than my ADHD-addled/Fossilizing cranium, EDH--TOTALLY forgot about that little soliloquy...
I'm glad you went back to this today. I didn't read it yesterday. Wow.
My kids act like crack addicts for those things. I've always cringed at all the artificial crap in them and now I'm wondering what else they might be laced with.
"Mr. Mondella, 57, shot and killed himself in his office bathroom just as city investigators were discovering that a marijuana farm lay beneath the factory."
Yay! Our tax dollars win another victory in the War on Drugs!
Perhaps the conundrum raises another disturbing question: If the bees cannot resist those three qualities, what hope do the rest of us have?
Bees are driven solely by instinct and humans are not. That's "what hope [we] have".
Duh.
I saw something on television the other day about how bees will forage on anything sweet and showed some interestingly colored honey that resulted from foraging, among other things, old discarded candy and antifreeze.
Oooo! Artificial calcium chloride! I wonder in what nasty ways that differs from the natural stuff that you can find plentifully in, for example, seawater.
I tell you, artificial chemicals are the bane of existence. We should just ban them. And then we can ban chemicals in general. I mean, who wants chemicals in his food? As Jenny McCarthy would say, yuck-ee!
Honey made from rhododendron and azalea nector is poisonous to humans. Red sugar water, not so much. Neither one hurts bees.
I don't understand the sentence, "Could the tastiest nectar, even close by the hives, compete with the charms of a liquid so abundant, so vibrant and so cloyingly sweet?" Cloyingly means it is disgusting or sickening. Bad choice of words.
The CPAC live feed was awaiting Scott Walker's appearance and they had a debate among staunch Libertarians that would make you want to go out and buy lots of Marijuna right away.
It is the best medicine there is for pain, it seems. I know one MS patient who moved to Oregon for that reason.
Nice troll madisonfella. Should get an award
No trolling at all. One of the few things I agree with Scott Walker is that marijuana needs to remain illegal. It leads to heroin use if it doesn't kill you first.
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