HIGHHOLYBEES
Rosh Hashanah honey made on city rooftop
There’s a lot of buzz around this Manhattan bakery leading up to Rosh Hashana.h.
For the first time in its fiveyear history, Breads Bakery is using its own beehives on a rooftop just north of Union Square to make honey for the high holiday that kicks off Sunday.
“We’re really excited about it,” Gadi Peleg, co-owner of Breads, told the Daily News. “We’ve become more focused on sustainability and local sourcing, as a lot of places have. It seems like the one thing you can do in Manhattan in a meaningful way.”
Shoppers can score an 8ounce jar of the honey made by Manhattan bees for $25 at the Union Square and Lincoln Center locations of Breads Bakery while they last. Apples are traditionally dipped into the sweet stuff during the twoday Jewish New Year celebration to symbolize the hope of a sweet upcoming year.
Once the bakery with Israeli roots decided to produce its own honey for the holiday, Peleg reached out to Andrew Coté of Andrew’s Honey, a vendor at the Union Square Greenmarket, just steps from the bakery and a frequent source for the shop.
Coté supplied the bees and scouted the area, eventually finding a neighbor with a green rooftop who agreed to host the hives, Ballet Tech dance school on Broadway.
“The human factors were complicated,” Peleg said. “Finding the roof was difficult. The rest really requires knowhow, which Andrew had. Once you get the hives up, the bees do the rest.”
Coté then trained Breads’ chief operating officer, Kelly Jacques, in beekeeping. “She studied inside out and has become a real expert in the field,” Peleg said.
The bakery expects to get about 100 to 200 jars of honey from four hives that each host about 60,000 bees. According to Peleg, the insects head out and explore different parts of the city each day, resulting in each batch of honey collected having a “different taste depending on where they were hanging out in Manhattan.”
The bakery doesn’t mix the batches into one homogenized version, but preserves their individual flavors.
It’s expected that about a third of the bees will die in winter, Peleg said. But the bakery plans to keep the hives operating with the hope of collecting more honey next year.
“It’s an amazing opportunity,” Peleg said. “They don’t take up a lot of real estate. We will keep this going as long as we can. Maybe next year we’ll be able to use them in some of our products.”