New Yorkers swarm for many reasons: flash mobs, Occupy Wall Street, the cronut line. Two weeks ago, a group of thirty thousand Manhattanites, give or take, caused a ruckus when they exercised their freedom of assembly in Times Square. The trouble was, they were bees. The runaway swarm settled on the umbrella of a hot-dog cart at Forty-third Street and Broadway. Within an hour, an officer from the New York City Police Department was in a beekeeping veil, sucking the swarm up with a special vacuum. The Times Square bees became instant celebrities: Reuters live-streamed the whole thing, while the official Twitter account of the N.Y.P.D. beekeepers fielded questions. Q: “How does this happen???” A: “Just like us, they’re only looking for a place to cool down.”
All this raised another question: the N.Y.P.D. has beekeepers? There are two, it turns out: Officers Michael Lauriano and Darren Mays. Both are regular policemen who happen to be bee enthusiasts. “We’ve always had an officer who shares their knowledge of beekeeping with the department,” Lauriano, who responded to the Times Square swarm, said a few days later. “Now that beekeeping has been becoming more of a new thing for New York City—people are having rooftop bees, balcony bees, bees in the parks—we’re faced with the challenges of: what if they swarm off?”
Mays, a midnight-patrol cop in the 104th Precinct, in Queens, started responding to bee calls in 2014, when the previous bee expert retired. He got into beekeeping ten years ago, when a friend showed him his hive. “They’d buzz by me, and I didn’t twitch,” he recalled. “It’s just the most beautiful, calming thing in the world.” His wife bought him a beekeeping kit for Christmas, and he now keeps a five-hive apiary in his back yard, in the Hudson Valley. Lauriano joined him as an official N.Y.P.D. beekeeper a year ago. “I grew up on a hobby farm, and I’ve always had a passion for agriculture,” he said. He used to raise chickens at his home, on Long Island, but long patrol hours made feeding and egg collecting tough, so he got into bees. “The whole hive has basically everything it needs to live on its own,” he said. “I’m just kind of the landlord. And, of course, they produce honey, and I take some for myself as the rent.”
The two bee cops were talking in the First Precinct, in Tribeca, where Lauriano works. They get an average of two calls per week. Lauriano usually handles weekday swarms, while Mays covers nights and weekends. Most of the rogue swarms they collect are domesticated—escapees from a hobbyist’s roof—but feral bees sometimes cluster in rotting tree trunks. Swarm season typically runs from mid-May through late July. This year had been slow, they said, since the harsh winter killed off a lot of city bees. Then came August 28th.
Lauriano was finishing his shift when he got the call from Times Square. By the time he arrived, the area was cordoned off and a ladder was in position. “It was an orchestra waiting for me,” he said. Mays, who had been asleep at home, got up to man the Twitter account, which quickly gained three thousand followers. Lauriano first tried to defuse the situation. He climbed up the ladder without protective gear and “introduced” himself to the bees: “I just wanted them to know that I’m going to be up here, and we’re going to help you.” Then he gently vacuumed them up, with a contraption he made himself, using a motor, plastic buckets, and rubber hosing. (Mays uses a state-of-the-art Colorado Bee Vac.) “We’re not exactly sure where they came from,” Lauriano said, of the swarm. “Probably a rooftop in the surrounding area.” No one has ever claimed a rogue swarm, so it’s up to the bee squad to care for them. Lauriano brought the Times Square bees back to his home, where they’re currently settling in and doing “fantastic,” he said. There were no casualties.
Mays keeps a hive on the roof of his precinct, in Ridgewood, which he invited a visitor to check out last Wednesday. He collected its inhabitants in June, from a lamppost on Worth Street, downtown. (It was a rare three-swarm day: Tribeca, midtown, and Long Island City.) The wooden hive was about the size of a mini-fridge. Mays put on a veiled hat and gloves and opened the cover. “The key to all of this is to work slowly,” he said, revealing thousands of worker bees making honey for the winter. He had just come from traffic court, and he added, somewhat wistfully, “Honeybees live in a perfect society. Everyone has a job to do, and they do it accordingly.”
Down in the station house, the officers were raving about the hyper-local honey that Mays handed out last summer, from a swarm he’d collected near Mount Sinai. “He’s actually taken me up there a couple of times to put new queens in,” one officer said, leaning a tattooed arm on a filing cabinet. “It’s amazing how docile they are.” ♦
