New data show the New York metropolitan area is the largest contributor to America’s gross domestic product, but its position at the top of the national ranking may be due more to the inclusion of neighboring economic powerhouses such as Greenwich and Stamford, Conn., than its own economic strength.

New York City actually is responsible for less than half of all economic activity in its own metropolitan area, the data show. According to the city comptroller’s office, its economic activity constitutes 43% of the region’s total economy.

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The New York City metropolitan area, which includes parts of Connecticut up to Bridgeport, as well as Long Island and northern New Jersey, accounts for 6.6% of the country’s population while contributing 9.1%, or $1.129 trillion, of the country’s GDP.

The Los Angeles metropolitan area came in second place, contributing 6.3% of U.S. GDP or $788.9 billion. Although the New York region has 7% more people than the Los Angeles area, New York contributed 43% more to the country’s GDP.

Thousands of years of evolution and cultivation have led honeybees to seek certain qualities in a home — the ideal being something like a hollowed-out wooden tree limb.

A few hundred years of construction by humans in New York City, it turns out, have resulted in an abundance of structures that mimic the conditions bees like best — from the water towers that dot the rooftops to the cornices and overhangs that adorn the buildings.

And each year about this time, thousands of bees swarm to those sites in the city, setting up hives and causing a certain amount of apprehension among the people who spot them.

Many calls are made to the Police Department, and are directed to Officer Anthony Planakis, 46, a beekeeper in his free time and for the last 14 years the department’s in-house expert on the subject.

When Officer Planakis joined the department in 1994 he had to fill out a form listing his areas of interest and expertise, and he put beekeeping — a skill learned from his father — at the top of the list

“New York City provides endless places that make great hives,” he says.

On Tuesday, for the second time in two days, Officer Planakis was dispatched to an apartment building in the Bronx, on the corner of Crotona Avenue and 182nd Street, where a swarm of bees had congregated to build a hive.

On Monday, dressed in a protective suit and mask, he had sprayed sugar water to weigh down the bees clustered on a corner of the three-story brick building. He then brushed the queen bee and some 6,000 of her loyal protectors into a brown box and carted them off to his personal hives in Newtown, Conn.

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The largest hive he was called to remove in New York was in a forested area off the Moshulu Parkway in the Bronx, where someone had been keeping bees illegally.

“There were 12 separate hives, each with at least 60,000 bees,” he said.

The keeper was never found.

Although raising bees in New York City has long been a violation of the city health code, the rooftops make an ideal place to keep honeybees and there is a thriving illegal bee scene.

Howard H. Roberts Jr., the president of New York City Transit, said on Thursday that he is considering bringing the two-level buses back to Fifth Avenue.

Mr. Roberts said his interest was based on simple economics. Double-deckers can carry about as many people as the longer bus that the transit agency now uses, according to Joseph Smith, senior vice president for the agency’s bus operations. But they cost less to maintain because they lack the complicated connector and accordion apparatus that links the two portions of an articulated bus.

Those who rode the double-deckers in their heyday have fond memories.

“Back in the days when money was important, it was great to take a date out and you could have a nice ride up and a nice ride back on a summer evening,” said William J. Ronan, 95, who first rode the buses when he came to New York during his student days in the 1930s (three decades later, he became the first chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority).

“It was sort of a genteel way to travel and perfectly respectable,” he said. “Between that and the Staten Island Ferry you could have a wonderful date.”

Mr. Ronan said the seats in front on the upper deck were considered the best ones. “You tried to get up in the front seats, which were great because you had the view up the avenue,” he said.

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Mr. Ronan tried to bring the double-decker buses back in 1976, when the transportation authority bought eight of them from a British company to be used in a pilot program. [Transit spokesman Charles F.] Seaton said the buses had mechanical problems and were off the road after about two years.

But there were other problems, including on the continuation of some Fifth Avenue routes where the buses travel along Riverside Drive.

“The problem then was all the trees along Riverside Drive had grown such that the branches were in the way of the bus,” said Robert A. Olmsted, who worked at the authority with Mr. Ronan. If the buses are brought back, he said, “they’d have to do some clearance runs and trim some trees, which may upset some people, too.”

The people don’t always ride in a hole in the ground. Those aboard the No. 1 train in Lower Manhattan are now riding part of the way through the air.

There is no view to admire. The trains are still well below street level, on tracks running within a box-shaped concrete tunnel that bisects the World Trade Center site. But instead of soil, the south half of that 975-foot stretch of subway rests on a newly built network of brawny steel beams atop a forest of minipiles reaching down to bedrock.

And in recent weeks, workers have dug out so much soil from around those minipiles that they have created an underpass beneath the subway large enough for construction machinery to pass through. In the reconstruction of the trade center, it is a significant milestone of east meeting west.

Gradually, the entire volume under the subway box will be cleared of soil, until the section from Liberty to Vesey Streets is structurally more like a viaduct than a tunnel.

That will open up nearly 40 feet of vertical space under the tracks. And given how many purposes the site must serve, every cubic inch is precious.

The subway box will eventually be an integral part of the larger, multilevel subterranean structure at the trade center site. Meanwhile, it must be supported on a sturdy but temporary structure while everything is built around it.

Riding the New York City Marathon on the city’s mass-transit system was almost as grueling as running it.

It took seven buses and three subway trains to trek through five boroughs along roughly the same 26.2-mile route some 40,000 runners will follow this Sunday.

My race began on the S53 bus in Staten Island, and like the start of the actual marathon, there was little space to breathe.

I had to duck errant elbows and fists, and thanks to one of my fellow riders, I was overcome by the odor of a thousand people sweating.

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If I made every single connection, I could complete the marathon in three hours, 45 minutes — a respectable finish an hour quicker than my running time last year.

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I crossed the finish line in Central Park in four hours, 57 minutes — two minutes slower than I ran the race in 2006.

Of that time, I spent three hours, 15 minutes riding buses and subways and another one hour, 42 minutes waiting for them.

Along the route that took me on seven buses and three subways, I swiped my MetroCard 10 times.

The wait for a bus may seem more predictable at 11 stops where New York City Transit has begun testing electronic signs that show when the next one is due.

The signs relay information from a satellite positioning system that has been installed as part of a pilot project on 168 buses that operate on several routes in Manhattan. The routes include the city’s busiest, the M15, which runs on First and Second Avenues, where seven of the signs have been placed.

Under the system, each bus communicates location data to satellites, which transmit the information to a center in Brooklyn. From there, a radio signal goes to the electronic signs, which post the number of minutes until the next bus.

The Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park will reshape Manhattan’s skyline and force a revision of the record books that catalog the city’s giants.

The 54-story building stands 945 feet tall, but tops out at 1,200 feet with the addition of an ornamental spire, inheriting the title of New York’s second-tallest skyscraper. It was held by the Chrysler Building since Sept. 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers were destroyed and the Empire State Building returned to the top spot.

“The building is topped off already,” said Jordan Barowitz, director of external affairs of the Durst Organization, the real estate development firm that partnered with BofA to erect the building. “The last piece of steel went in a few weeks ago and the first tenants will arrive in May 2008.”

One Bryant Park doesn’t break any records without its decorative spire, but the use of such a device to raise a tower’s bragging rights isn’t out of the ordinary.

So then it must be just a big joke that the G is rated “most reliable”? As in, it’s the most reliably sucky train? Read the report (.pdf) to find that the “G line ranks tied for 5th place out of the 22 subway lines.” No kidding!

The gray mist that rises from manholes when water touches the steam pipes below seems as much a part of the New York landscape as hot dog vendors.

But five days after a steam pipe exploded in Midtown, leaving one person dead and injuring dozens of others, New Yorkers had reason to be apprehensive about the vapor, particularly after heavy rains yesterday produced fresh trails of steam from manholes around the city.

Bob Flanagan, a 29-year veteran of Con Edison’s steam division, was particularly careful yesterday as he circled the city in search of vapor plumes, which might indicate a problem with the steam pipes below.

Because water collecting inside a steam pipe or seeping into one has been a cause of previous pipe ruptures, the company routinely checks manholes for vapor after rainstorms and pumps out water that reaches the height of the pipes.

There are several possible causes of vapor streams. One is rainwater, which vaporizes when it hits the hot pipes. Sometimes water mains leak onto steam pipes. And Con Edison sometimes intentionally lets off steam during underground construction.

“I’m looking for something over one foot high but with a little force behind it,” Mr. Flanagan said, before driving his minivan past a swirl of steam at the intersection of East Broadway and Pike Street in Lower Manhattan. Without a map, he drove over the steam mains beneath South Street, Water Street, Broadway and smaller roads, pointing to buildings that buy steam from Con Edison.

Every few minutes, he spotted a “whispering” vapor stream too thin to worry about. But about five times during his one-hour loop, he found a manhole that “gushed” steam strong enough that he radioed a dispatcher, who then sent a crew to pump out the water accumulating below.

Mr. Flanagan is one of 10 Con Edison supervisors who travel the city streets after rainstorms. There are also 12 two-person crews around Manhattan that pump out rainwater.

The beating of a butterfly’s wings, it is said, can lead to a hurricane an ocean away. And a break in a Manhattan subway rail, though it may lack poetry, can really foul up the morning trip to work in Brooklyn and Queens.

That is what happened at 6:55 a.m. yesterday, when the operator of a Queens-bound N train leaving the Lexington Avenue station radioed a dispatcher to say that the train was being delayed by a red signal that should have been green.

For many riders on the N, R and W trains, that was the beginning of a morning journey that was more headache than head-to-work.

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The radio call from the N train went to a dispatcher at the Rail Control Center, the subway system’s computerized nerve center in Midtown. The dispatcher told the train operator to go slowly past the signal.

A call then went out to a pair of track maintainers based at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, two stops from the problem.

They jumped on a train and by 7:15 a.m. were at work at the Lexington Avenue station, according to John Johnson, the Rail Control Center’s assistant chief. They discovered a break in a rail about 1,200 feet from the east edge of the platform.

It was not unexpected. A red signal of the type that stopped the N train is often a result of cracked or broken rails, according to Antonio Cabrera, director of track engineering. That is because electrical power for the signal system flows through the rails, and a crack can break the circuit to the signal, sending it into its default red position.

“It was a clean break, like if you cut it with a knife,” said Mr. Cabrera after reading a report about the work. “It was up and down. It looked like a joint exactly.”

The cause of the break was not clear, Mr. Cabrera said, although the cold weather may have been a factor.

The metal contracts in the cold, he said, increasing stress on the rail, and small cracks can turn into large ones.

Once the break was discovered, Mr. Johnson said, dispatchers at the control center halted Queens-bound trains heading toward the Lexington Avenue station.

Now workers had two separate problems. The break had to be repaired, and trains had to be diverted.

A repair crew was called in and by 8:20 a.m. had set to work. Power to the third rail was cut on that section of track.

Using a large drilling machine, a crew of three workers and a supervisor drilled holes in the rail on either side of the break, Mr. Cabrera said. Then they fitted metal bars to both sides of the rail and bolted them in place. At 10:15 a.m. an empty subway train made a test run over the mended rail. And at 10:20 service resumed under the East River to Queens, just over three hours from the time the broken rail was discovered.