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You guys hear about the guy in Brooklyn who killed himself a couple weeks ago when visited by the police at the cherry factory?

Red-hued bees led authorities to discover New York City’s biggest-ever marijuana farm in the basement of a cherry factory—triggering the owner’s suicide.

Were it not for the red bees of Red Hook, Arthur Mondella might still be Brooklyn’s own Cherry King and New York City’s No. 1 pot grower.

He might still be running his family’s maraschino-cherry factory while secretly operating New York City’s biggest-ever marijuana farm in the basement.

The bees changed everything, because the explanation for what so mysteriously turned them red indirectly gave investigators a pretext to twice search the factory after they were unable to obtain a search warrant.

The second search was last week and led to the confirmation of what a tipster had told investigators six years before. Mondella’s double life ended with the 57-year-old father of three daughters committing suicide in a factory bathroom after shouting, “Take care of my kids!” through the locked door.

Back in 2010, Mondella likely did not imagine that it would eventually lead to his undoing when urban beekeepers in the area surrounding Dell’s Maraschino Cherries factory in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn began noticing that their bees were producing bright red gunk instead of honey.

The bees themselves were not actually red, but they assumed that hue when their translucent honey stomachs carried red stuff whose source was initially a mystery.

The hue immediately brought maraschino cherries to mind, but some of the affected hives were halfway across the harbor on Governor’s Island.

“Everybody was joking about the cherry factory,” recalls Cerise Mayo, the keeper of the Governor’s Island hives as well as others in Red Hook. “All of us were, ‘No, it can’t be.’”

Mayo figured at the time, “There’s no way they’re going to cross the water to the cherry factory.’”

An apiculturalist then analyzed the red gunk and found Red Dye # 40. Both bees and spilled syrup—high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and red dye #40—were seen outside the factory.

At the same time, Mondella was growing concerned about bees invading his factory. He contacted John Bozek at the nonprofitBusiness Outreach Center Network. Bozek emailed the New York City Beekeepers Association (NYCBA), seeing help.

“We need somebody to act as a ‘bee consultant’ in a difficult case in Brooklyn,” Bozek wrote. “One of our clients, a factory that has been in business for 50 years and employs 30 people in the community, has had a serious problem with a neighboring apiary. Could you give me a call?”

NYCBA founder Andrew Cote has a true beekeeper’s appreciation for workers and busy-ness. He called Bozek and subsequently communicated with Mondella, both by phone and via dozens of emails. Cote later gave The Daily Beast an analysis of the case via email:

“The factory feared that the large numbers of bees would one day somehow get into the factory and into jars of cherries (theretofore it did not happen). They also did not want any sort of negative PR, a la, ‘cherry factory poisons bees’ (which thankfully did not happen).”

Cote went on, “Beekeepers (particularly the hipster versions) in Brooklyn sometimes (often?) lead a myopic sort of existence wherein only their world view, or their set of needs, is valid or important.”

He continued, “The factory employed hundreds if not thousands of Brooklynites over half a century—and wished to ensure the longevity of their good name and product (such as it was). The beekeepers were annoyed that their bees were drinking run off from a food factory. Everyone had a valid beef.”

At Mondella’s invitation, Cote made repeated visits to the cherry company that had started as a storefront run by Modella’s father, Ralph Mondella, and uncle, Arthur Mondella. Cote met with the younger Arthur Mondella there three times for a total of around four hours.

“Arthur allowed us unrestricted and unaccompanied access to all areas of the property that we wished, and an OK to document with photographs, which we did,” Cote recalls.

NYCBA’s goal was simple.

“We were trying to understand the process by which the honeybees were gaining access to the HFCS mixed with red dye #40,” Cote says.

An attorney named Vivian Wang, keeper of the bees (nicknamed ‘the Chelsea girls”) atop the officers of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Manhattan, went with Cote to one of the meetings with Mondella.

“An amicable, straightforward guy who was totally open to talking about a solution,” she recalls of the factory owner.

She remembers that Mondella suggested that he could also put out other colors of syrup.

“You could have rainbow-hued honey,” Wang says. “He was trying really hard to work with us.”

The rainbow honey was certainly an original, good idea, but the stuff the bees made with the dyed syrup was not really honey at all and tasted terrible.

Eventually, it was determined that the bees were feeding off syrup as vats of cherries were moved briefly along a sidewalk in transit from one section of the factory to another. The solution was no more difficult than finding an appropriate way to seal the containers.

The problem was a problem no more. Mondella had seemed just the kind of guy you would want to run a human hive.

“Arthur was, to me, an honest, somewhat stereotypical Brooklyn-ite (in the best sense) and a gentleman who cared about this family’s business, the neighborhood, and the welfare of his many local workers,” Cote recalls in an email to The Daily Beast. ”He was polite, accommodating, and pleasant. He clearly cared that the issue that brought me there at his request—the ‘red honey’ be solved to the satisfaction of all.”

In the days leading up to the resolution, The New York Times had run an article headlined “The Mystery of the Red Bees of Red Hook” that suggested the bees were feeding on runoff from the cherry factory.

And in this, investigators at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s discerned a legitimate way to further a stalled investigation.

http://www.thedailyb.....rries.html