Beekeeping Still Illegal In NYC - Fines Up To $2,000 - Talks Beginning To Alter/Abolish Law

[hatrack]

Kathleen Boyer suspects the mailman. She said she could not think of anyone else in her neighborhood who would have complained about the two beehives she kept under a pine tree in her front yard in Flatbush, Brooklyn, leading the city’s health department to fine her $2,000 last fall. “I was kind of surprised,” said Mrs. Boyer, an art director with a media company. “People see us in our bee suit and they’d bring their kids to watch us and ask us questions.”

New York City is among the few jurisdictions in the country that deem beekeeping illegal, lumping the honeybee together with hyenas, tarantulas, cobras, dingoes and other animals considered too dangerous or venomous for city life. But the honeybee’s bad rap — and the days of urban beekeepers being outlaws — may soon be over.

On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s board will take up the issue of amending the health code to allow residents to keep hives of Apis mellifera, the common, nonaggressive honeybee. Health department officials said the change was being considered after research showed that the reports of bee stings in the city were minimal and that honeybees did not pose a public health threat. The officials were also prodded by beekeepers who, in a petition and at a public hearing last month, argued that their hives promoted sustainable agriculture in the city.

A ban, of course, has not deterred many New Yorkers from setting up hives on rooftops and in yards and community gardens, doing it as a hobby, to pollinate their plants or to earn extra income from honey. Although the exact number of beekeepers in the city is unknown, many openly flout the law. They have their own association, hold beekeeping workshops, sell their honey at farmers’ markets and tend to their hives as unapologetically as others might jaywalk, blaming their legal predicament on people’s ignorance of bees.

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/science/earth/15bees.html

[brooklynite]

1. The heck with bees, I want BATS...

My wife and I have been trying to attract bats to the backyard to eat the incessant mosquitos we get in the summer. We put a bat house (yes, they really sell those things) on the outer wall last year, but so far, nobody's moved in...

[Kolesar]

2. Besides

It's none of your beesness what I do in my backyard.

Cleveland passed a "bees and chickens" ordinance a few years ago. cluck cluck

[paulsby]

3. NYC is nannystate central

bees, salt, transfats, etc.