By KELLY PUCCI photos by Amanda Temple

From the October/November 2007 Issue

Lake Magazine covers the hottest information on the Lake Michigan area.

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The scene would not be out of place at a summer farmers’ market in Indiana or farm stand along a Michigan road. In fact, the scene took place in a vacant lot in an economically depressed neighborhood on Chicago’s west side.

Thompson is a city boy. So it is in Chicago that he raises bees and, unlike his rural counterparts, it is in Chicago that he sees a bright future for beekeepers. In 2004, Thompson founded Chicago Honey Co-Op, which keeps an apiary – a yard of bee houses – in the North Lawndale neighborhood at 3740 W. Fillmore St., on what was once the site of the Sears mail-order empire.

Calvin Mitchell, who lives nearby, maintains the hives, which each house 30,000 bees. He admits that prior to job training, he was “a little scared of bees.” Now, he tends to them and helps with the annual harvest, which reaps 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of honey each year. “I’ve been stung too many times to count,” he says.

The co-op sells its honey at the Chicago Green City Market in Lincoln Park and the Oak Park Farmers’ Market. That exposure earned the attention of Mayor Richard Daley, who approached Thompson several years ago with the idea of building an apiary on the 100-year-old roof of City Hall. Thompson’s beekeeping there proved so successful that in 2006, he expanded the program to include four beehives on the roof of the Chicago Cultural Center.

Although the bees don’t need to fly any farther than the $1.5 million garden on top of City Hall to find a source of nectar, they seem to favor flower boxes on Michigan Avenue and The Lurie Garden in Millennium Park. “The flowers in Millennium Park give the honey a fruity flavor,” Thompson says. Roof Top Honey, the brand name of the light-amber honey produced by the City Hall and Cultural Center bees, is sold at Gallery 37 in downtown Chicago.

Not every city official in the Midwest supports beekeeping to the extent that Mayor Daley does. After an Evanston, Ill., teenager built a beehive in his backyard, the city council added a four-page amendment to the City Code – establishing regulations for beekeeping that mandate, among other things, “gentleness” of queen bees and the assurances of beekeepers that bees “will not congregate at swimming pools, [and] bibcocks.” At $25, a beekeeper’s license is more than twice the cost of keeping a dog or cat on the right side of Evanston’s laws.

But the ordinance does acknowledge the contributions bees make to Midwestern agriculture as pollinators of local crops. Because of the drastic decline in wild honeybees in recent years, domestic bees are more important than ever: Without them, there would be no cranberries from Wisconsin, blueberries from Michigan or pumpkins from Illinois. That’s because, as Michigan’s state apiarist Michael Hansen explains, “the wild population of honeybees no longer exists. Michigan’s beekeepers are providing nearly all of the pollination once completed by a vast supply of wild honeybees.” Hansen estimates that of the 125 crops raised in Michigan, more than half rely heavily on domestic honeybee pollination.

So, while some honeybees get a long winter’s rest, many of the Midwest’s bees are shipped to southern and western states to pollinate crops. The practice of moving Midwestern bees isn’t new: It began after the Civil War, when an enterprising Chicago honey salesman named C.O. Perrine floated a boatload of bees along the banks of the Mississippi River. (Unfortunately, the business venture was a failure: The boat broke down, deckhands mutinied and Perrine was forced to set the bees free.)

But with the advent of modern flatbed trucks, migratory beekeeping has become big business. Michigan beekeepers – including Jim and Deb Dahlke, whose bees pollinate berry crops for Ellis Farms in Benton Harbor, Mich. – pack up their hives each year for a long drive to Florida, where the bees suck up orange-blossom nectar to pollinate the fruit at the heart of the $9 billion Florida citrus industry. And each year, the Almond Board of California sends a plea to Midwest beekeepers to join West Coast bees in the pollination of 580,000 acres of almond trees.

Bees at the Indian Summer Honey Farm in Germantown, Wis., feast on dandelions until Thanksgiving, when they board semi-trucks for a long ride to Florida to pollinate crops. After their work is done, these lucky bees are allowed to mate until they return to Wisconsin in May.