Sample Responding to Nonfiction Reading

Time: 30 minutes

 

In the following article, Susan Dominus explores the strange red bees in Brooklyn, N.Y.  The bees’ bodies, their honey, and even their honeycombs turned from amber to red.  The beekeepers suspected a nearby factory was to blame.

 

The Mystery of the Red Bees of Red Hook

By SUSAN DOMINUS                   

November 29, 2010

 Cerise Mayo expected better of her bees. She had raised them right, given them all the best opportunities — acres of urban farmland strewn with fruits and vegetables, a bounty of natural nectar and pollen. Blinded by devotion, she assumed they shared her values: a fidelity to the land, to food sources free of high-fructose corn syrup and artificial food coloring.                                             

And then this. Her bees, the ones she had been raising in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and on Governors Island since May, started coming home to their hives looking adventurers, the wild waggle dancers, the social networkers incessantly buzzing about their business — who were showing up with mysterious stripes of color. Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.

“I thought maybe it was coming from some kind of weird tree, maybe a sumac,” said Ms. Mayo, who tends seven hives for Added Value, an education nonprofit in Red Hook. “We were at a loss.”

An acquaintance, only joking, suggested the unthinkable: Maybe the bees were hitting the juice — maraschino cherry juice, that sweet, sticky stuff sloshing around vats at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company over on Dikeman Street in Red Hook.

“I didn’t want to believe it,” said Ms. Mayo, a soft-spoken young woman who has long been active in the slow-food movement. She found it particularly hard to believe that the bees would travel all the way from Governors Island to gorge themselves on junk food. “Why would they go to the cherry factory,” she said, “when there’s a lot for them to forage right there on the farm?”

It seems natural, by now, for humans to prefer the unnatural, as if we ourselves had been genetically modified to choose artificially flavored strawberry candy over strawberries, or crunchy orange “cheese” puffs over a piece of actual cheese. But when bees make the same choice, it feels like a betrayal to our sense of how nature should work. Shouldn’t they know better? Or, perhaps, not know enough to know better?

A fellow beekeeper sent samples of the red substance that the bees were producing to an apiculturalist who works for New York State, and that expert, acting as a kind of forensic foodie, found the samples riddled with Red Dye No. 40, the same dye used in the maraschino cherry juice.

No one knows for sure where the bees might have consumed the dye, but neighbors of the Dell’s factory, Ms. Mayo said, reported that bees in unusually high numbers were gathering nearby.

And she learned that Arthur Mondella, the owner of the factory, had hired Andrew Coté, the leader of the New York City Beekeepers Association, to help find a solution.

“Bees will forage from any sweet liquid in their flight path for up to three miles,” Mr. Coté said. While he has not yet visited the factory, he said that the bees might be drinking from its runoff, and that solving the problem “could be as easy as putting up some screens, or providing a closer source of sweet nectar.”

Could the tastiest nectar, even close by the hives, compete with the charms of a liquid so abundant, so vibrant and so cloyingly sweet? Perhaps the conundrum raises another disturbing question: If the bees cannot resist those three qualities, what hope do the rest of us have?

All summer long, friends of Ms. Mayo were forever pointing out the funny coincidence that her first name means “cherry” in French; as a slow-food advocate with the last name Mayo, she was already accustomed to such observations.

Mr. Selig, who owns the restaurant chain Rice and raises the bees as a hobby, was disappointed that an entire season that should have been devoted to honey yielded instead a red concoction that tasted metallic and then overly sweet.

He and Ms. Mayo also fear that the bees’ feasting on the stuff could have unforeseeable health effects on the hives.   But Mr. Selig said there was something extraordinary; too, about those corn-syrup-happy bees that came flying back this summer.

“When the sun is a bit down, they glow red in the night.   And it was beautiful.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

 

1.       In paragraph 1, the line “she assumed they [bees] shared her values” uses the figurative language element of

a.      Metaphor

b.      Simile

c.       Onomatopoeia

d.      Personification

2.      In paragraph 10, the line  word forage can best be described as

a.      Feed from

b.      Resist

c.       Overlook 

d.      Search for

3.      Which of the following is an example of alliteration?  

a.      “Blinded by devotion, she assumed they shared her values.”

b.      “Maybe the bees were hitting the juice—maraschino cherry juice, that sweet, sticky stuff sloshing around vats at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company…”

c.       “If the bees cannot resist those qualities, what hope do the rest of us have?”

d.      “…the social networkers incessantly buzzing about their business…”

4.      How far away will bees search for sweet liquid?

a.      One mile

b.      Two miles

c.       Three miles

d.      Four miles

5.      In paragraph 11, the word conundrum appears.  What does conundrum most likely mean based on its use in that sentence?

a.      Zero

b.      understanding

c.       Musically

d.      Puzzle

6.      Based on the information in paragraph 12, what does Ms. Mayo’s first name, Cerise, mean?

a.      Cherry

b.      Apple

c.       Red

d.      Bee

7.      In what way does the setting impact the bees’ conflicts?

a.      Red Hook is not a suitable environment for raising bees.

b.      Red Dye No. 40 causes colony collapse.

c.       Brooklyn is a part of the five boroughs of New York City.

d.      The Maraschino Cherry Factory is located nearby in Red Hook and provides a sweet treat for the bees.

8.     Based on the article, which of the following predictions about the future of the bees’ lives is true?

a.      Bees will continue to produce red honey even if they don’t have the red dye.

b.      Bees’ health is in question because 2009 is the first time this has ever happened.

c.       Bees will continue to be illegal because of the health hazards.

d.      Bees will continue to drink from the Dell factory, unless a closer source of nectar is provided.

e.      Bees

9.      Which of the following best represents the style in which the article is written?

a.      It is a persuasive article.

b.      It is written in chronological order.

c.       It is an informative article.

d.      It is a personal narrative.

10.  What effect does Red Dye No. 40 have on the bees’ honey at the end of the season?

a.      The honey was black.

b.      The honey was too sweet and had a strange flavor.

c.       The honey was full of larvae.

d.      The honey can be used on products that are red in color.

Open-ended Response

Use the article, “The Mystery of the Red Bees of Red Hook,” to respond the following open-ended questions. 

·         Be sure to extend your response with connections to The Secret Life of Bees (metaphorically or literally). 

·         Use insight and analysis in your response.

1.      In the article The Mystery of the Red Bees of Red Hook, honey bees’ honey, honeycombs, and even their stripes turn red mysteriously. 

·         Explain why this mystery occurs.

·         How do the beekeepers respond to their problem?

  Use specific details and/or examples from the text in your response.