Beekeeping has the city abuzz
“They’re coming,” Christina Blaustein said to her 4-year-old son, Reife, who was practically jumping out of his white beekeeper’s suit just after dawn in Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan.
Reife pulled off his mesh hood and ran to meet a box truck bearing a mural on its side of animated bees buzzing in front of the New York City skyline.
The truck’s back door opened to reveal its cargo: three million Italian honeybees.
They did not seem that happy after having endured a 15-hour drive up from Georgia, but Reife was delighted, as he examined the hundreds of wood-andscreen boxes, each one holding more than10,000 bees.
He picked out two boxes. His mother paid the bee man $150 apiece for them and drove them off to Long Island, where the family keeps hives.
They were among roughly 150 beekeepers who flocked to Bryant Park for the bee delivery, to replenish hives across the city and the region: on building rooftops, in small urban backyards and sometimes even indoors.
“I know someone who keeps a hive in the living room of his apartment” near an often-open window, said Gregg Hubbard, a makeup artist from Chelsea who keeps bees in the backyard of a friend’s apartment building in Harlem.
Beekeeping in New York City was long a furtive hobby. It has become more popular since the city made it legal in 2010 to keep hives. For many of the estimated 500 beekeepers now in the city, the annual bee delivery has become a springtime ritual, said the bee man, Andrew Coté, founder of the New York City Beekeepers Association.
Every April, Coté brings up millions of bees to sell — nearly at cost, he said. On Friday, he brought nine million, a third of which he would sell in Bryant Park.
One by one, the beekeepers stepped up to claim their purchases. They ferried the buzzing boxes home by car, train, bus and bicycle. Each box had straggler bees — beekeepers call them hobos — buzzing outside along the screens.
The daunting parcels were placed in shopping bags, cardboard boxes, and in the case of Spencer Davis, 33, of Brooklyn, a backpack made from the hide of a water buffalo, which held two boxes as Davis cycled back home to Bedford-Stuyvesant.
One box was bought by April Greene and Arthur Meacham, a married couple from Brooklyn who have no children. “Now we have 10,000,” joked Greene.
Hubbard, the makeup artist from Chelsea, said he hoped his buzzing box of bees would help him command some respect on the subway up to Harlem.
“I’m going to take them out of the bag and just sit them on my lap,” he said.
“Good way to get a seat,” Meacham said.