In a photo from the New York Police Department, bees are removed from the Staten Island Ferry Terminal on Sunday, Aug. 4, 2019. The police department’s beekeeping unit used a special vacuum to safely relocate the bees. (New York City Police Department via The New York Times) NEW YORK – The St. George Ferry Terminal on Staten Island was swarming with perpetrators. They surrendered without incident. All, that is, except for one.
“I actually got stung,” Officer Darren Mays said Monday. “It happens. There’s a lot of people amazed. There’s a lot of people who are like, ‘I could never do something like that,’ and commended me for being brave.”
Mays is a member of the New York Police Department’s beekeeping unit. And Sunday afternoon, the unit got a call from a police lieutenant with ferry security that about 25,000 honeybees were clinging to a metal awning at the terminal. The area was cordoned off with yellow police tape, as skittish passengers kept their distance from the colony. A few curious individuals dared to come closer.
This was a job not for the faint of heart, but rather for the bee team, which, apart from the one sting, safely removed the bees by nightfall. The special unit is made up of two officers and sometimes a third with beekeeping expertise. It has its own Twitter account.
Mays, 48, said he had been stung three to four times out of the 30-40 times he had helped relocate a swarm. He wore protective netting and a white beekeeping suit top Sunday while sucking up the bees with a Colorado Bee Vac, which has a hose connected to a hivelike box.