To the untrained eye, Danny Coyle’s on Haight Street looks like any other Irish bar in the city: It has ephemera-covered walls, unbothered bartenders wiping down tables and slinging Jamesons, and loyal patrons who gather to guzzle Guinnesses.
But to urban apiarist Jeff MacMullen, Danny Coyle’s is more than just another local dive. It’s also home to some of his many colonies of honeybees.
“I keep all my bees in auspicious locations,” said MacMullen, 65, lumbering across the pub’s sticky floors in a well-worn canvas beekeeping suit. “This is one of them.”
On the back porch of the Lower Haight pub are two of his hives, each of which live in a handpainted wooden bee box that bears the name of MacMullen’s micro raw honey business, We Be Honey. Around the city, he has at least 10 more: There are two on Haight Street, one in the Castro, one in the Mission, one in the Excelsior, one in Ingleside near City College, one near Alamo Square, and several scattered within the Tenderloin.
His operations also extend across the Bay and down the Peninsula, with hives in residential backyards in Oakland, Marin, Napa, and San Mateo. These days, he even keeps a few buzzing boxes on the gravel roof of the Grand Hyatt at SFO.
MacMullen has been scouting many such lucky locations for his honey operation for about 15 years. A former massage therapist originally from Queens, MacMullen stumbled into the beekeeping biz(zzzzz) when he struck up a friendship with one of his clients, a man named Rokas Armonas, who invited MacMullen to come see him in American Canyon, a suburb just south of Napa.
“I met him up there, and the place was not pretty, just concrete, sheds, and tools,” said MacMullen. “Really an industrial wasteland.”
MacMullen soon learned Armonas was the founder of the regional honey grower Bay Area Bee Company, and that the ugly plot was one of Armonas’s many honey processing sites. Under Armonas’s guidance, MacMullen eventually learned the ropes of beekeeping, took the American Canyon site off Armonas’s hands, and formed We Be Honey.
Bay Area Bee Co. offered an enviable business blueprint, producing at scale and selling wholesale to Rainbow Grocery, Bi-Rite, Gus’s, and other regional grocery chains. But MacMullen is a free-wheeling, self-described druid with a bushy gray mustache and a twiddly beard he keeps in a ponytail. He does things a little differently. He operates We Be Honey like one might play Stardew Valley, selling his wares every Sunday at the Divisadero Farmers’ Market but otherwise running on friendship and the barter system.
That’s what makes his many apiary locations so auspicious: Aside from the magical feeling one gets stepping into a lush garden hidden behind busy city streets, almost every backyard belongs to someone he considers a friend.
“I’ve got keys, I’ve got passcodes to all my friends’ backyards,” he said, jingling a mass of keys about the size of a mango attached to his belt underneath his beekeeping suit. “I also market it. I meet someone at a bar or wherever, and I say, ‘By the way, if you have space for bees in your life, I could put them in your backyard, and you’d get honey from your own backyard,’” MacMullen explained.
After carefully extracting a frame of honeycomb from one of the bee boxes at Danny Coyle’s, MacMullen explained that Brian Coyle, the bar’s owner and MacMullen’s longtime friend, is the only partner-in-bees to whom he sells wholesale.
“I don’t necessarily want anyone selling my honey who doesn’t know about these,” he said, gesturing to the hives. “You need to be able to answer questions like, ‘Why is it cloudy? Where did it come from?’ Brian knows about it, so he’s allowed to sell it.”
At Danny Coyle’s, We Be Honey is used in hot toddies and honey sodas, and behind the bar patrons can buy 8-ounce jars of We Be Honey for $15.
MacMullen gets most of his bees from a breeder in Napa, and they are quite docile. Down Haight Street is MacMullen’s most rambunctious hive, a wild colony of honeybees who just happened to be swarming in a fruit tree in the backyard behind the Sparc dispensary, where MacMullen already had two bee boxes.
“Ah, there are my girls,” MacMullen sighed as he opened the wild hive. (He calls all his bees his girls.)
When he’s not accompanied by a reporter, MacMullen said he usually doesn’t talk much while he handles his bees; instead, he likes to listen. After removing the lid, he laid his head, protected with a mesh veil, an inch above the open frames and listened to the intricate cacophony of thousands of worker bees, echoing deep in the box.
“That’s me saying, ‘I listen to women. I don’t tell them what to do,’” MacMullen joked back at Danny Coyle’s as we sipped honey sodas bursting with the same floral, fruity notes I tasted when MacMullen scraped a hunk of honeycomb off one of the frames in the backyard.
“But really, I listen to them as part of my work and my devotion,” MacMullen said. “When you put your head in the hive, you learn not to worry about that bee in your face and you learn to listen. You’re in harmony with nature.”
