Bees on the roof. Goats by the bedroom. Chickens in the backyard.

All around Santa Fe, people are raising animals that provide honey, eggs, wool and, if one isn't overly attached, meat.

They're also good for providing some laughs, for teaching responsibility and for being balm for the soul.

Meet some of the urban hobby farmers in the City Different.

Bees on the roof

On a cold and windy October day, teacher Nancy Lee Marquis donned a hat ringed by netting to protect her face and neck, and grabbed an old metal can that looked like the Tin Man's head in The Wizard of Oz. Marquis clambered up a ladder to the flat roof of her home off Rodeo Road and then struggled to light a bunch of grass stuck in the can. Once the grass was lit and putting out a stream of smoke, she carried the can over to a small box on the roof and lifted one of the strips of wood lying on top. Inside, hundreds of bees made a steady hum.

The smoke was supposed to discourage them from getting mad at her, Marquis said. "They're pretty calm," she assured one visitor who was allergic to bees and stayed as far back from the hive as possible without falling off the roof.

Nearby were big chunks of golden waxy comb mangled into gooey blobs on cookie sheets. They were the remains of the combs Marquis collected three weeks earlier. She had squeezed them and strained out 12 quarts of honey. Now she was leaving the crushed wax on the roof for the bees to clean and use in making new comb.

Marquis, an eighth-grade special services teacher at Monte del Sol Charter School, isn't new to beekeeping on rooftops. Her father kept his hives on a flat part of the roof on their family's home in upstate New York where she grew up. "I used to go up and watch them come and go. I found it very soothing," she said, as she let some more smoke into the hive. In fact, the hat with netting and the smoker she uses now belonged to her dad.

Marquis stopped beekeeping when she was a young adult with a family. But she raised llamas and chickens while living in Embudo for 17 years.

When she moved to Santa Fe, bees moved into a wall of her home. She hired a hive remover to take them out, and realized after they were captured that she wanted to keep them. "I sort of stumbled back into it," Marquis said.

Like most beekeepers, Marquis has been stung. "It swells a little. That's all," Marquis said, shrugging her shoulders.

Bees collect sugar-loaded nectar and turn it into honey. They collect pollen to provide protein for the larvae and each hive's queen bee. The honey feeds the worker bees, and it takes 8 pounds of honey for the bees to produce 1 pound of beeswax, said Kate Whealen, coordinator of the Sangre de Cristo Beekeepers.

The Santa Fe County group has 180 members, most of them backyard hive keepers like Marquis. They talk bees via a Yahoo group in between monthly meetings. Instead of wine tastings, the group sometimes has honey tastings.

Whealen said beekeepers support keeping gentle bees. "It is better to have beekeepers managing bees in the city rather than wild colonies that are not managed for aggression. Generally we won't tolerate aggressive bees," she said.

And yes, while those infamous, mean Africanized bees have been spotted in New Mexico, none survive the winters, Whealen said.

Marquis said she practices the art of "neglectful beekeeping. Once they were established, I just pretty much ignored them."

The bees seem to get along fine. Keeping the hive on the roof means she doesn't have to worry about skunks or other critters getting into it.

Marquis finished putting some of the honeycomb back into the hive, carefully put back the hive top and talked to the bees for a moment. The familiar distinct smell of bees takes her back to her childhood. "Something about the smell around beehives, it reminds me of my dad. It's a wonderful smell."

Llamas in the barn

Harlequin, aka Harly, was having none of a stranger's coaxing to eat some shaved carrot peels. The brown-and-white llama looked disdainfully through his large, dark eyes, lifted his head — topped by banana-shaped ears — and turned his nose up at the offering.

June Kirkpatrick only gives her four llamas thinly sliced carrots as snacks. "Llamas will choke on anything big," she said as her black-and-white llama, Mascara, came over for attention.

The llamas share Kirkpatrick's barn off Tano Road with her one remaining horse — a gentle paint named Sonny.

Kirkpatrick hires men from Edgewood to shear the llamas each year and ships the wool to a company in Michigan that cards and cleans it. Once the wool is shipped back, she spins and weaves it into beautiful cloth on one of her two looms. Wool from her llamas is soft as silk.

Growing wool is the llamas' only job; they don't pack supplies into the mountains. "They're pets," Kirkpatrick said, as she called to Frosty, Mascara's son.

Llamas are curious, gentle and have really bad breath, Kirkpatrick said. They cackle like wild turkeys when they're scared and hum when they're happy. They're stubborn when they don't want to be caught, but Kirkpatrick can always lure them in with juicy carrots.

Kirkpatrick and her husband, Charles, have lived in Santa Fe for 38 years. He's used to her bringing home animals. First it was rescued dogs, then a rescued horse. She coaxed him into loading four goats into his truck once. At one time she also had Navajo-Churro sheep and Angora goats.

Ten years ago she brought home her first llamas. "Charles is a real good sport," Kirkpatrick said.

"These guys are so mellow," Kirkpatrick added. "It is nice to come and talk to them. If I'm upset, I like to go down to the barn. It's calming."

She discovered the deep comfort of animals 24 years ago when one of the couple's two sons committed suicide. "I would ride my Appaloosa all over out here and just think," she said.

Like many a devout farmer, Kirkpatrick rises at 4:30 a.m. For her, it is more habit than necessity. She heads to the barn about 6:15 a.m. to feed in the morning, mostly because Sonny the horse is impatient. She brushes and talks to the llamas every day. A renter on the property feeds them in the evening, but when it is stormy or a predator is nearby, Kirkpatrick is at the barn checking on the animals.

Several years ago, Mascara had trouble delivering one of her babies in the middle of the night. Kirkpatrick couldn't find a veterinarian to come out, so she called the Taos woman who sold her the llamas and sought advice. The baby was in the wrong position. Kirkpatrick worked through the exhausting night helping Mascara deliver the baby, but it was dead. "Mascara and I bonded after that," she said.

It was all in a day's work for an urban farmer.

Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com.