PC P RO F I LE S
The World through a Bee-Shaped Lens Jamie Lozoff OPC ’11 BY MARK F. BERNSTEIN OPC ’79
The first question everyone asks a beekeeper is, “Do you get stung a lot?” The answer, Jamie Lozoff OPC ’11 said with a sigh, is “Yeah, you do.” It’s an occupational hazard and usually the beekeeper’s fault for failing to wear a veil or protective gloves. But sometimes, the bees are to blame. “Some hives have gentle bees,” Lozoff explained by telephone from the village of Gyé-sur-Seine, about 200 kilometers southeast of Paris. “The ones I have, that’s not the case.” French bees, apparently, have an attitude. The honey bees found in the United States are mostly Italian honey bees (Apis mellifera linguistica), she explained. “They’re very chilled out.” In France, the more aggressive black honey bees predominate (Apis mellifera mellifera) and, with what might be interpreted as Gallic surliness, they are likely to attack anyone who ventures too close. Who knew? Lozoff knew because she has studied and worked with honey bees since taking a field research class with now-retired PC teacher Nora Comiskey when she was in 11th grade. The class visited a hive on the edge of campus tended by then-kindergarten teacher Joel Eckel and, as Lozoff recalled, “something special happened that day.” Holding the frames in which the beehives were built, Lozoff said she saw all the stages of life: the queen laying eggs, the larvae being born, the drones bringing back pollen to turn into honey. “It was sort of magic.” She and classmate Maxwell Bolno OPC ’11 started a beekeeping club, which in turn formed her Senior Comprehensive Project.
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Bitten by the beekeeping bug—perhaps “stung” is the better way to put it—Lozoff took a gap year after graduation and traveled to the south of France, which solidified two ambitions: that she wanted to pursue beekeeping as a career and that she wanted to
do it in France. Matriculating at Bard College, she chose to spend her first semester in Berlin, then transferred to the Sorbonne, where she majored in biology, specializing in the study of honey bees. She spent five years in Paris and joined L’Abeille de Grand Paris, the Parisian beekeepers’ association, when she saw some of its members tending hives in the Luxembourg Gardens. Working in restaurants to pay her bills, she noticed that many chefs did not know where to get locally sourced honey, so she started working with the hives in the garden of the Palais de Toyko and opened a small apiary about 45 minutes outside of Paris.
Resettled in France, beekeeper Jamie Lozoff OPC ’11 pursues her fascination with the intersections between insects, the environment, humans and agriculture.
