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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Always buy local honey from real beekeepers. Otherwise you are probably buying sugar water made by non worker bees.

Doesn't that open a market for local "beekeepers" to buy honey from China and package it up with inkjet printed labels and hand screwed lids that say "local from <insert town>"? Placebo and power of suggestion is strong. I often wonder myself if produce I am buying at farmers markets a really authentic or just resold produce from grown on a large agro-business farm someplace across the country.

Also, I am a ware of a scheme that is importing Chinese garlic into Western Europe through Eastern Europe. You see Chinese garlic much like honey is banned there. Yet unbeknownst to them West Europeans (Germans, French) have been chowing down on Chinese garlic for a while now. The way it works it like this. A large shipment is brought into a city next to the EU border. Then small paid cargo van drivers make lots of trips across the border seemingly as local farmers going about their business. Then it is either sold at farmers market or "local" farmers buy it from them and sell it as "local" produce. Easy peasy.

Bees can be raised, with a few precautions, even in urban settings. What you really need is an experienced mentor who can help consider things like where to place the hive so it doesn't pose a problem for neighborhood kids (rooftop is good btw), and other precautions, such as not wearing gloves when handling the bees if in an urban environment.

I am an amateur beekeeper but I do not understand how wearing gloves is related to raising bees in an urban environment.

You are right, that urban bees are fine. Providing a water source will prevent most nuisance issues.

The argument is that if you wear gloves you miss out on the early signs of alarm from the bees, and therefore they are more likely to swarm and get aggressive towards bystandards. Without gloves you get a better sense of the alarm state and can avoid problems. It's generally easier to manage alarm state without gloves.

I got my first hive a few years ago, and I am noticing that there are fewer recommendations of working without gloves in urban environments today. I don't know why this is the case. Also I am used to a large yard/small town environment (lots of pedestrians, folks doing yard work, etc), and there are plenty of other environments where I would expect this to be less of an issue (for example a rooftop hive on the third storey is going to provide a lot less exposure in this regard). So demographics and hive placement may have something to do with it.

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