I climbed up to a west-end rooftop on Monday to covertly taste some honey.

The bee hive was in a powder-blue box at the back of a garden of sedums and vegetables up in the air.

Gurushabd Khalsa lifted the lid and slowly pulled up one frame, crawling with bees and half full of honeycombs.

“Bees only sting in defence of the colony,” she said calmly. “If one lands on you, be calm and brush it off gently.”

Khalsa is a young urban beekeeper. So far — other than at her family’s farm near Owen Sound — she is tending only one hive on a private rooftop. Her aim, however, is to have 29 more by next spring and, after giving the property owners their cut, to sell it commercially through her company, Hogtown Honey.

Imagine buying your neighbourhood honey at your local farmers’ market. How cool would that be! Could you taste the difference between Rexdale honey and Riverdale honey?

“It always tastes completely different, fruity or floral or spicy, depending on what is in bloom in the neighbourhood,” said Khalsa, 24.

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Now wasps I don’t like. But bees — what’s not to love? They are nature’s matchmakers, pollinating many of the plants and vegetables we eat. They are fat and languid and impeccably polite, minding their own business up in the grape vines over my deck where I often type on sunny afternoons, my hair speckled with pollen.

I understand if you are allergic to bee stings. But if you are just frightened, an hour with Khalsa should give you a good case of what she calls “bee fever.” The drama of a bee’s life, the romance, the Shakespearean vengeance …

Did you know a colony will breed a number of princess bees, feeding each of them the apiary equivalent of steroids, until the first one hatches? Then she seeks out her still-sleeping rivals and murders them …

How about the male bees, the drones, whose only task is to inseminate the queen once? For the next three years, they lumber around like teenage boys, muttering to themselves, until they’re pushed out of the hive.

“It’s not even a stereotype. It’s the way it is,” Khalsa says. “All the work is done by women.”

She came down with bee fever three years ago, while a student at University of Toronto. After hearing a lecture about beekeeping, she helped launch the university’s beekeeping club and tended two campus hives.

She graduated last year and moved to Mumbai, where she managed the urban beekeeping program for a small development organization called Under the Mango Tree.

What she found: oddly enough, cities make good habitat for bees. All those planted gardens with different vegetables and cascades of flowers provide a summer-long buffet, unlike a large crop of clover or alfalfa in the countryside that flowers once and is finished. Fewer pesticides, which can kill bees, are used in cities. Plus, all that asphalt absorbs heat, which leaves our winters in Toronto less frigid than they should be.

The inverse, of course, is true: bees make our gardens thrive. A small farm’s productivity can double after a hive is introduced, Khalsa says.

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See how enchanting bees are?

(They don’t attack in a swarm, by the way. They swarm when their colony gets too big and half of them split off to find a new home. Before they leave, they feast on honey, which makes them drowsy. “You’d never be harmed by a swarm,” Khalsa says. “They are more docile then. Plus, they don’t have a home to defend.”)

Sensing this win-win, cities around the world have lifted their beekeeping bans. Vancouver boasts hives on its city hall and convention centre. New York’s Waldorf-Astoria offers guests homemade honey. There are hives atop the Louis Vuitton store on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

In London, local beekeeping has become so popular that the British Beekeeping Association has counted 156 colonies in one square mile — far too many.

And in Toronto?

Technically, beekeeping is illegal in most places. The Ontario Bees Act forbids hives “within 30 metres of a property line.” How many properties in the city do you know that are 60 metres wide and 60 metres long?

“She’ll find that hard,” says Fred Davis, who tends the hives on the roof of the Canadian Opera Company and at Casa Loma. “She’ll have to fly under the radar.”

The law is enforced by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs on the basis of complaints received. Complaints are rare. But why should Torontonians not be able to raise bees when Vancouverites and New Yorkers are successfully doing it?

Khalsa plans to fight the law this winter. I hope she wins. I’d like to sample Danforth honey from near my home.

The west-end honey had a strong aftertaste of cinnamon.

Catherine Porter’s column usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. She can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca