The Perfect Pursuit In This Urban Hive

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Buzzing From the Rooftops

Executive chefs, Aron Weber and Ian Bens, take time away from the busy kitchen to tend over 100,000 honeybees located on the rooftop of The Fairmont Hotel in Georgetown.

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"Almost all of them washed out once they realized that, basically, this is about dealing with insects," she said through the veil that cascaded over her head and shoulders as she worked to loosen the frames that house her colony.

Then there are those who are greatly alarmed at the global bee crisis, a worldwide epidemic of colony collapse disorder.

"I think it is fair to say that for most urban beekeepers, we see beekeeping as a means to support and enliven the environment around us, rather than an agricultural pursuit," Burham said. "I'm not in it for the honey."

Colony collapse disorder, a combination of disease and environmental factors that is slowly killing the world's honeybees, also affects pollination. "In the absence of pollinators, our urban greenscape suffers, and after that the bugs, the birds, the critters, and even the water and the people," Burnham said.

That is one reason the White House added a bee hive to the organic garden. Burham is a mentor to the White House beekeeper.

But there is also a certain cool factor to being the benevolent master of several thousand insects that scare most people.

"My friends who came over used to want to see them. But then one of them got stung. So not so much anymore," said Alison Fritz, a 15-year-old Sidwell Friends student who might be the city's youngest certified beekeeper.

It is also a way to do something old-fashioned, handcrafted and rural right here in the city, said Joseph Konrad, 43, who keeps a couple hives on the grounds of the Franciscan Monastery in Northeast Washington.

On a recent Saturday, he fired up a smoker containing an aromatic combination of pine needles and blasted a gentle puff of smoke into his hive to lull his bees into a torpor.

Along with regular honey, Konrad produces bottles of mead using fermented honey.

Nathan Zeender, 32, a database administrator who home-brews beer in his spare time, plans to add the honey from his two hives to his brew.

That brings us to the gourmands.

Like most things cosmopolitan, city honey can be more flavorful and more exciting than country honey.

Urban bees have to work harder to gather their pollen as they buzz from the patio herb garden to the tulip poplar by the playground and then to the linden tree that arches over the corner store.

The combination of flavors is exciting for Ian Bens and Aron Weber, chefs at the Fairmont who campaigned to get hives on the hotel's rooftop.

After the lunch rush -- about the time cooks used to head into the alley for a cigarette break -- the two go to the 10th floor of the hotel with their smoker, don their modern beekeeper get-ups (theirs look like fencing gear) and tend the hives.

"We've had a taste; it's wonderful. So floral," Weber said. "What do you think of a beetini?"