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Honeybees help at least 30% of crops grow. The half-inch buzzers pollinate all kinds of plants - they're needed to grow almond trees, vanilla vines, avocados, and cranberries.
Since 2017, bees have also become an integral part of a New York City Police Department (NYPD) building in Queens. On the roof of the 104th precinct, officer Darren Mays keeps more than 30,000 honeybees. By night, he's a beat cop, patrolling the streets of the Ridgewood, Queens neighborhood. But by day, he's a beekeeper in charge of the department's only rooftop hive.
Mays gained temporary fame this summer when he vacuumed up a migrating swarm of bees that perched atop a hot dog cart umbrella in Times Square.
Mays and another officer, Michael Lauriano, are responsible for responding to any issue a New Yorker calls in with that involves a "stinging insect." He said he responds to about a dozen calls during a typical summer, as people request help with bee swarms, wasps nests, and more. Before Mays and Lauriano, an officer named Anthony 'Tony Bees' Planakis served as the NYPD's first bee 911 responder.
But the hive on top of the precinct where Mays works wasn't a planned part of his job. It formed out of necessity: During the summer of 2017, Mays answered so many bee calls (roughly two dozen), that he didn't have time to bring recovered bees to his house outside the city, where he keeps five bee colonies. Instead, he assembled a makeshift bee orphanage on top of the office.
I stopped by the rooftop hive last week to check out the yellow-and-black invertebrates there. They're now working quickly to produce honey before the temperature shifts and they go into survival mode for the winter.
Take a look.