Next Door Nancy

Local beekeepers stung by neighbors' opposition

Nicole Perullo has three kids, so you might think the last thing she wants in her back yard is a bee hive.

But, reports CBS News correspondent John Blackstone, bees, she has.

"It's about the environment, you know?" she remarked. "I'm trying to teach my children about how important honeybees are to our food supply."

Bees pollinate the blossoms that produce about a-third of the food we eat, Blackstone points out.

But, in her town just north of San Francisco, it's illegal to keep a bee hive.

The woman who lives next door filed a complaint over Perullo's bees.

"How does she think she gets fruit and flowers?" Perullo wonders. "I mean, there's bees out there!"

So now, Perullo is on a mission to convince her city council that urban beekeeping is part of the solution for an insect that needs help.

For almost five years, a mystery ailment called Colony Collapse Disorder has killed bees in unprecedented numbers, Blackstone notes. Commercial beekeepers have lost about a-third of their hives every year.

But, across the country, bees have been getting help from city dwellers, Blackstone observes. Michelle Obama has them in her White House garden.

At farmers' markets in New York City, Andrew Cote sells honey from his rooftop hives.

"Each hive," he says, "produces about 100 pounds of honey, on average, per year."

And, Blackstone says, when it comes to keeping beehives in cities, it would be hard to get more urban than the ones he showed "Early Show" viewers on what used to be a freeway on-ramp in downtown San Francisco. It was, as he said, buzzing.

Karen Peteros, who helps tend the hives, says, "One of the big challenges for urban beekeeping, or even suburban beekeeping, anywhere in the country, is always fear."

Last year, it seems, fear drove someone to spray insecticide into the hives, killing more bees than Peteros could count.

"It was very heartbreaking," she says. "Tens of thousands, probably 100,000, maybe 200,000 bees" killed.

But that loss spurred new support for beehives on the block.

"In this neighborhood, at least" says Peteros, "a lot of people appreciate that bees are here and make our city a nicer place to live."

At the Randall Museum in San Francisco, Nancy Ellis teaches about honey bees by providing a view into a hive. She also has good advice for new beekeepers with nervous neighbors.

The Horse Next Door - Nancy Schluntz

The two bay geldings live next to the house where I stayed for two weeks, under the shadow of Taos Mountain in northern New Mexico. Each horse has a blaze of white on the front nose. We started tentatively, and deepened in a master / student.

Their stands are in the corner of a larger adobe-walled corral. Each stall is approximately 20 by 36 feet, which seemed great for a stall, but small for permanent residence. At one end, a flat iron roof covers a third of the space for the horses have shelter when it rains. This end were heaps of manure.

Orange metal fence sections wired together enclose the stalls. The section closest to me had faded to pink. Barbed green metal fence posts connected by four strands of wire mark the property line. The horse’s leaning out to reach the grass on this side had bent the pink fence section out at a precarious angle and collapsed the top wires of the second fence. 

I took a fresh carrot out to visit. I don’t have much experience with horses, and approached tentatively. The closest horse spotted the carrot, though, and tossed his head and snorted. I asked his name, but didn’t grasp his answer. I called him Mr. Horse.

“Good morning, Mr. Horse. May I talk with you?” Mr. Horse thought about it.

I changed topics. “Do you have shoes on all four feet? I can’t see a shoe on your left front foot.” Mr. Horse backed up and shook the dirt off his foot so I could see the shoe on his hoof. I thanked him.

We had similar simple conversations for the first few days. At first, he had pushed his head toward me, shaking it, looking for more carrots. Now he stood quietly, watching me. The morning sun rose behind him, showing the long hairs that looked like a thinly whiskered beard on his cheeks and chin. A curl of hair beside each nostril formed a mustache. I asked what his life was like.

“Not much happens. We stay here. Sometimes the man comes and we go out. I would like to run more. I enjoy being out on the trail and mountain. I know our ancients ran free. I have that memory.” He continued his unbroken train of thought: “I notice the scent of grass, insects walking on blades of grass and on the ground, the patterns of bird flight, the feel of the wind and its subtle shifts, the play of light as it changes moment by moment. Clouds form and dissipate and reform. Trees are in constant motion. I can see the buds of new growth unfolding on branches, drinking in the air and sunlight.” commented the horse, amused.