Experts say beekeeping is an important line of defense against killer bees.
(Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA)
Africanized Honeybees – also known
as killer bees – are moving farther
north. The hybridized bees escaped
from a lab in Brazil in the 1950s.
Mark Brush reports:
Transcript
Africanized Honeybees – also known
as killer bees – are moving farther
north. The hybridized bees escaped
from a lab in Brazil in the 1950s.
Mark Brush reports:
These bees have established themselves in a number of states throughout the southern U.S. They spread naturally and they are spread through trade. The bees can hide out in shipping containers. One swarm was found inside the engine compartment of a new car.
Now, despite the nick name “killer bee” – experts say, yes they’ll defend their nest with more gusto – but the killer bee name is just hype.
Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman is a bee expert with the USDA. She says it’s likely that the bees will keep spreading – but beekeeping is an important line of defense against Africanized honeybees.
“You know, beekeepers, whether they’re small or large, are really the buffer between African bees and the public, because they keep pure European bees.”
DeGrandi-Hoffman says – Africanized or not – bees are still a critical part of our food system because they pollinate so many of our food crops.
John Howe keeps bees on the roof of his Brooklyn townhouse.
(Photo by Samara Freemark)
Beekeeping is a growing hobby – there
are even a couple of hives on the White
House lawn. And beekeeping is even getting
popular in America’s largest, most urban
city – New York. The only problem is,
beekeeping is actually illegal in New York.
Samara Freemark went to find
out why some New Yorkers are doing it anyway:
Transcript
Beekeeping is a growing hobby – there
are even a couple of hives on the White
House lawn. And beekeeping is even getting
popular in America’s largest, most urban
city – New York. The only problem is,
beekeeping is actually illegal in New York.
Samara Freemark went to find
out why some New Yorkers are doing it anyway:
When I first got in touch with the Gotham City Honey Co-op and told them I wanted to do a story on beekeeping in New York, they were a little nervous about talking with me. They were worried about a New York City health code that makes urban beekeeping illegal. The city’s worried about people getting stung. The Honey Co-op didn’t want to blow anyone’s cover, but eventually they did hook me up with John Howe.
Howe keeps bees on the roof of his Brooklyn townhouse – which means every day – several times a day, actually – he climbs four flights of stairs and one shaky ladder to get up to his hives.
“I gotta go up the ladder. I’m getting tired of it.”
(sound of roof opening)
“Turned out to be a nice day.”
Howe keeps two hives. He says there could be up to 150,000 bees in them.
“You can see them all going in and out. Lot of bees, yeah.”
Honey bees can fly up to three miles from their hives, looking for flowers to pollinate. Howe’s bees probably buzz by thousands of his neighbors every day. I asked him if anyone ever complained about them or called authorities to turn him in for illegal beekeeping. Howe said his neighbors are actually pretty cool with the bees.
“I give them free honey, so that helps. People just raise their eyebrow or shrug and say, ‘that’s neat.’ They call me bee man. I walk down the street, they say, ‘hey bee man, you got any honey?’”
Across town, Roger Repahl raises honeybees in the garden of a church in the South Bronx. He started beekeeping ten years ago, when local gardeners noticed that their vegetables weren’t getting pollinated.
“The community gardeners were complaining that they were getting a lot of flowers but very little fruit. So Greenthumb – that’s the community gardening wing of the parks department – Greenthumb said that’s because you don’t have enough pollinators in the South Bronx.”
So Repahl trucked some hives down from Vermont, and he says the bees pretty much solved the neighborhood’s pollination problem.
Now, this is the kind of story that gets beekeepers like John Howe pretty steamed up about New York’s anti-beekeeping laws. Like a lot of cities, New York is doing just about everything it can to encourage community gardening. But to grow your own food, you need insects to pollinate your plants. John Howe says banning honeybees is like banning local food.
“The best reason for making bees legal is that they pollinate so many plants. The more bees that we can raise and keep, the more chance we have of having food.”
It’s not quite that clear cut. At least, that’s what James Danoff Burg says. He studies insects at Columbia University. He says there are native bugs that do plenty of pollinating. Beetles, for example, and other kinds of bees like honeybees. And those native species are being driven out by honey bees, which are originally from Europe.
“I think it’s a mixed bag. They have benefits to people, for certain. And from a human perspective, if all you’re concerned about is that your plants get pollinated and you can get the fruits that come from that, it’s a pure positive bag. The negative part of that mixed bag comes when you start to think about native biodiversity.”
But Danoff Burg says preserving native biodiversity maybe doesn’t matter so much in a place like New York. The city’s ecosystem has already been changed so much, and there are other, more wild places where native insects can thrive.
So even though NY is America’s biggest city, it might also be the best place in the country to raise bees. As long as you keep them out of sight of the law.
Beekeeper Rich Wieske started with two hives in downtown Detroit. Now he manages more than one hundred throughout the city and its suburbs. (Photo courtesy of Rich Wieske, by Rebecca Cook)
Rich Wieske investigates the hives. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
The smoker calms anxious bees down. It masks the alarm pheromones bees give off and also covers up human scent. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Rich Wieske’s hives are tucked into side lots in downtown Detroit. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Honeybees are dying. Sometimes entire hives
are dying and scientists can’t figure out exactly why.
Some people are trying to help, and one of the ways
they’re helping is by becoming beekeepers. Rebecca
Williams reports there are some beekeepers who actually
raise bees in big cities:
Transcript
Honeybees are dying. Sometimes entire hives
are dying and scientists can’t figure out exactly why.
Some people are trying to help, and one of the ways
they’re helping is by becoming beekeepers. Rebecca
Williams reports there are some beekeepers who actually
raise bees in big cities:
Some people call them guerrilla beekeepers. They like to keep their hive locations a secret. That’s
so the neighbors won’t get worried about 60,000 bees living next door.
There are white beehive boxes on rooftops in Paris, Chicago, Manhattan. And there are beehives
tucked into open lots in the middle of downtown Detroit.
(traffic and other neighborhood sounds)
Rich Wieske has been raising bees here for eight years.
“You think of cities as buildings. Detroit’s a little different because there’s been a lot of homes
bulldozed and torn down so there’s a lot of open fields – great for bees!”
Bees have a lot to eat in the city. They love the pollen and nectar from backyard gardens.
Rich Wieske’s just gotten a shipment of bees from California. Today he’s installing new worker
bees and queens into his hives in the corner of an empty lot. He’s one of the people trying to
replace the bees that are mysteriously dying.
This shipment of bees comes packed in wooden boxes – sort of like big shoeboxes – and there are
about 9,000 bees to a box.
(Buzzing)
“Don’t move fast but be warned okay?”
Wieske gives the box a big shake. No kidding – he’s shaking the box of 9,000 bees. They pour
into the hive in a bright orange stream. The bees buzz by our heads, and land in my hair, and fly
up my sleeves.
(buzzing)
But Rich Wieske promises the honeybees are not out to get us. They’d actually rather not sting,
because then they die.
Wieske has a hive he suspects is a little worked up. So he gets out the smoker. It looks like the
love child of a watering can and a miniature accordion. It sends out little puffs of white smoke.
(puffing noises)
“I use lavender, sage, any dried herbs. Also those
chips you find in the bottom of a gerbil cage.”
He waves the smoker around the hive before he lifts the cover off. He says the puffs of smoke
calm the bees down. It covers up the alarm pheromone bees give off, which apparently smells like
bananas if you’re unlucky enough to smell it.
Wieske got into beekeeping with two hives, and now he’s got more than a hundred.
“You’ve got to watch beekeepers. A lot of them become missionaries. You can tell a beekeeper because they love talking about bees, and they’ll talk to anybody about bees
and try to get them to become beekeepers.”
Wieske has a lot of apprentices.
(goose honking)
The next stop on our bee tour is a working farm – right in the middle of downtown Detroit.
Rich Wieske is helping his understudies install new bees in the hives. He’s giving Adam Verville
the same lesson he gave me earlier.
“This is the sort-of scary part.”
(shaking box and buzzing)
Verville says a lot of his friends keep bees in the city.
“People don’t have much money. These projects supplement our incomes essentially by giving us
food and honey.”
There is a lot of honey in beekeeping. Not a whole lot of money though. But the beekeepers say
they feel like they’re part of something bigger.
Stephen Buchmann is a bee expert. He coordinates the group Pollinator Partnership. He says
honeybees pollinate a third of the food grown in the United States. So every beekeeper replacing
disappearing bees helps.
“By having
thousands of people all over the country doing this they have a significant impact on pollinator
declines.”
Buchmann says you don’t have to raise bees in your backyard to help out. He says you can plant
flowers that bees like – like sunflowers and lavender. You can cut down on pesticides in your
yard or use none at all. And you can support your own urban beekeepers by buying local honey.
The Smitten Kitten in Minneapolis is one of the adult toy retailers which has stopped selling certain kinds of toys because of questions about the chemicals used to make them. (Photo by Lester Graham)
Co-owner Jennifer Pritchett of the Smitten Kitten holds a jar of adult toys that are leaching phthalates and seem to be melting into each other. Pritchett is concerned about whether the chemicals can have an impact on human health. (Photo by Lester Graham)
The adult toy store Smitten Kitten stopped selling certain toys because the retailers are concerned about the chemicals used to make the toys. (Photo by Lester Graham)
(Listeners should be aware of the adult nature of this report. It includes
sexually explicit descriptions.)
Not everyone uses sex toys. But some people certainly do use them. The American
sex toy industry took-in more than one-and-a-half billion dollars in revenue
last year. But there are growing public health concerns about chemicals used
to manufacture some of the adult toys. No government agency regulates sex
toys because the adult toys are labeled as novelty items. “Novelty” means
these toys are not intended to actually be used. Kyle Norris reports some
retailers want the industry to stop using the potentially harmful materials in
the toys:
Transcript
(Readers should be aware of the adult nature of this report. It includes
sexually explicit descriptions.)
Not everyone uses sex toys. But some people certainly do use them. The American
sex toy industry took-in more than one-and-a-half billion dollars in revenue
last year. But there are growing public health concerns about chemicals used
to manufacture some of the adult toys. No government agency regulates sex
toys because the adult toys are labeled as novelty items. “Novelty” means
these toys are not intended to actually be used. Kyle Norris reports some
retailers want the industry to stop using the potentially harmful materials in
the toys:
(Readers should be aware of the adult nature of this report. It includes
sexually explicit descriptions.)
A couple of years ago, Jennifer Pritchett and Jessica Giordani opened up The
Smitten Kitten, a small sex-toy store. On the day that their first shipment of
adult toys arrived they excitedly gathered around. As they ripped open the
box, a noxious odor permeated the air. It was that new, vinyl shower-curtain
smell:
“And we saw these oil spots. That’s what it looked like oil seeping through
the cardboard boxes. We were a little concerned, obviously, and we opened
them up and each of the toys, almost down to every single one, was beading
some oil-like substance up on the toys, through the product packaging,
through the styrofoam peanuts, and then through the cardboard.”
The entire shipment of adult toys was ruined. Pritchett started asking around
to the folks she knew in the industry. Someone told her that the oils leaching
from the toys are called phthalates.
Cheaper-end sex toys are made with polyvinylchloride, or PVC. PVC is a
synthetic material used in tons of things like building materials, medical
appliances, everyday household items and children’s toys. And much like
the children’s toys, most of the cheaper adult toys are manufactured in
China. There are no regulations on the manufacture of the adult toys in
China, and no regulations on the imports of toys in the United States.
In order to make PVC softer and more flexible – which is a desired effect in
certain adult toys – plasticizers called phthalates are added. And a lot of
phthalates go into jelly toys to make them more jelly-like. In fact, the
leaching toys Jennifer Pritchett had ordered are actually called jelly toys. But
that very un-technical term did not sit well with Pritchett. She sent a few of
the best-selling toys on the market to an independent chemist. To see what
the adult toys were really made of.
For instance one of the most famous sex toys in the country is called “The
Rabbit.” Everybody knows about that. Sex and The City had a big episode
about the rabbit habit. Oprah Winfrey gave away one to every person in her
audience. They’re everywhere. And I sent that particular toy to a lab, and it
came back that 60% of the total weight of that toy, so 60% of the total
volume of material is a chemical called dioctyl phthalatem, which is a
known carcinogen and teratogen.
It turned out the rabbit toy was made with materials from a class of
chemicals that’s linked to cancer and birth defects. It’s not known whether
materials used in some adult toys are dangerous to human health or not.
Because no one is testing them on humans.
In 2006, the Danish Technological Institute did study the health risks of
chemicals in adult toys on lab animals. Researchers found that some
phthalates are harmful to mice and rats in large amounts. Pritchett says that
if the consumer public knew that the materials in their toys might be a risk,
they probably would not use them. She says that the big picture here is about
a lot of things. And one of those things is a culture’s discomfort with
sexuality:
“It’s about a regulatory system that can’t even say the words ‘adult toys’ let
alone regulate it like they do children’s toys. It’s about a market structure
where people can make thousands of percent profit on cheaply made toys
and nobody’s going to do anything about it.”
There’s a lot of money in sex toys. Carol Queen is the staff sexologist at
Good Vibrations, a well-established California sex store. She says that
people have worried about phthalates in the toys that children suck on, like
pacifiers. In fact in Europe, children’s toys with dioctyl phthalate and other
kinds of phthalates have been banned. Once people started worrying about
children’s toys, they soon started to wonder about adult toys.
“In terms of the dildos and the insertable vibrators, at the very least, those
things are going to and on the mucosa, and if somebody’s having fun it’s
staying there for a little while. There’s friction, there’s the possibility of
leaching. And all of those things are potentially correct. The problem with
the discourse is that so far no one has had the opportunity to truly understand
what the implications health wise and otherwise might be for these materials
on human body. Because people don’t test sex toys.”
The big concern here is that sex toys directly touch mucous membranes. And
this contact is not buffered by any layer of skin. So the materials used in an
adult toy can potentially more easily be absorbed into the body.
For this report, I contacted more than twenty medical and health
professionals. They were the heads of research universities that specialize in
sexual studies. Or OB-GYN doctors, or the directors of sexual health clinics.
None of these health professionals were willing to be interviewed about
what can happen to someone’s body when they use adult toys made out of
potentially hazardous materials. They just don’t have the information about
it. Although when I spoke with them, the majority of those health
professionals were curious to hear this report.
We finally spoke with Dr. Susan Ernst. She’s the director of the Gynecology
Clinic at the University of Michigan’s student health services. She confirmed
that this topic is not on the radar for many health professionals:
“It hadn’t come up as a topic with patients. It hadn’t come up in any of the
medical conferences that I had attended. It hadn’t come up in the medical
journals that I have read. So I am embarrassed to say it came up through the
lay press bringing it up as an important issue.”
Dr. Ernst says that if a patient is using an adult toy that is potentially
dangerous, then health care professionals need to be knowledgeable about
this topic.
Jennifer Pritchett of Smitten Kitten says friends sometimes mention rashes
or burning they experience when using adult toys. They’ve been to the
doctor. But physicians often wrongly assume that it’s an STD or a toy that’s
not been cleaned properly. And the problem doesn’t go away.
The doctors don’t think about a connection between the chemicals used to
make the toys and how they might affect the body.
Pritchett says when she mentions that possible connection to a friend, she
can see a light-bulb go on over their head. Now that’s speculation of course,
but she thinks people need to put all of the pieces of the sex-toy puzzle
together. That’s why she stopped selling the jelly toys that were leaching
phthalates:
“We have to say we know the chemicals in these toys are dangerous. We
know they’re dangerous in other respects. We know if children put these in
their mouths, it’s dangerous. I think we’re going to have to extrapolate and
say well if adults put these in mouths or other parts of their body it’s also
dangerous. We’re just going to have to make a little leap there. But the
industry who is invested in keeping toxic toys on the market hides behind
that. They hide behind the novelty use only. The ‘nobody’s proven that this
specific toy causes cancer.’ I think it’s a cheap argument and I hope it doesn’t
stand up for too long.”
Pritchett says it’s not as if people are only buying adult toys as gag gifts. But
because the toys are so controversial, nobody expects the government to test
the safety of them anytime soon. But people are starting to talk about the
issue. A few months ago an adult toy trade magazine did a cover story called
“Attack of the Phthalates.” And one of the biggest adult toy retailers recently
announced it was phasing-out products that contain phthalates. Because
more people who use these toys are becoming concerned about whether
they’re putting themselves at risk.
Experts say beekeeping is an important line of defense against killer bees. (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA)
