With bee keeping now legal in the city, there are a lot more bees buzzing around town. And sometimes in the spring, those bees decide to pack up their queen and seek out new digs. It happens all the time. But thanks to many a human's irrational fear of the little buzzers (damn you My Girl!) people often freak out when a swarm flies by. But they don't need to! This is New York City—we've got a Bee Rescue Team, run by nycbeekeeping, to help find a home for displaced swarms.
In fact, yesterday around 2 p.m., the group saved a swarm in Park Slope that had settled at a Bee Pee gas station at the corner of Douglas and Fourth. Once alerted to the swarm “NYC Beekeeping’s Bee Rescue Team" was contacted and quickly went into action, collecting the bees into a box and delivering them to a new home in a community garden.
“Swarming is a normal and non-aggressive behavior that typically happens during a several week period in the spring when an older queen bee leaves the colony with a large group of worker bees to find a new home, allowing one of her daughter queens to remain in the original colony" explains NYC Beekeeping co-director Jim Fischer. "These flights are an awe-inspiring and natural means of reproduction of honey bee colonies.”
So don't freak out if you see a swarm around town in the coming weeks. Just contact your friendly neighborhood beekeepers and let them safely find the little plant pollinators a new home.
