Honey from Imkerei Mädelfleiß.
A few months ago I was on a corporate team building exercise for work, in which a chef took us to a farmers market in Berlin Schöneberg (yes, companies do and pay for weird stuff like this, yes, my life is weird). To be fair it was very nice, and the chef did a great job. As we visited various stalls we stopped at a stall selling honey. The man selling the honey was friendly and explained to us that this was local, Berlin honey. The bees live in the city and harvest honey from the flowering trees and plants here. They had different types of honey made from the nectar of various plants including chestnut and robinia, which they were able to separate based on the times that the plants were blooming. Some very unique and different flavors of honey, and delicious. I didn’t write down their name but I believe based on some googling that it was this company: Imkerei Mädelfleiß.
We hear talk about urban farming, and I know some people who have been involved in it, growing vegetables and salad in raised beds in empty lots or on rooftops. I have actually heard of one family operation keeping bees in Brooklyn as well, although I don’t think it was a commercial enterprise. One of my mother’s grade school students father gave her a jar of local Brooklyn honey, from Bedford Stuyvesant. Encountering someone producing urban honey as a commercial enterprise was a new one for me though, and quite interesting. I love bees, finding their society, behavior and life endlessly interesting. As you may be aware bees are incredibly important to our food system as they serve as pollinators for many of the flowering plants that produce our food, transferring pollen from one plant to another as they seek out nectar and allowing the plants to sexually reproduce without moving. You may also be aware that they are under serious threat, due to the reckless use of pesticides and herbicides in their natural countryside habitat.
In chatting with the honey seller he explained that actually he was in contact with other beekeepers in the country and while many of their colonies of bees were suffering negative effects due to being exposed to toxic farming chemicals, his bees were not. The city bees actually are quite able to filter out and deal with the air pollution in the city. Since many fewer people are growing commercial crops within city limits and spraying poison, this beekeeper’s city colonies of bees ended up being healthier than some of their countryside counterparts. The beekeeper had even participated in exchanges, sending his bees to the country, but he said that he didn’t want to continue it because exposing them to that environment wasn’t healthy for them, and they were better protected in the city.
I am always interested in these kind of unique and perhaps counter intuitive ecological developments, where the human built environment can provide habitat for other animals in a way we didn’t expect. Germany actually is quite progressive in regard to their treatment of insects including prohibition on killing certain types of bees and wasps in the summer, much to the annoyance of many locals. This is why Berlin bakery counter displays are often found swarming with hornets in the summer. I found this anecdote about the healthy city honey bees to be a hopeful one, and perhaps an indicator of how with some wisdom and attentiveness we can find new ways to co-habitate with the other living members of our ecosystem. Also the honey was delicious.
