Oh The Buzzin’ Of The Bees In The Co-Ops’ Eaves, In Their Cornices Or Water Towers

San Francisco has homeless people and New York gets bees:

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.

. . .

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.

The Cult Of Trees Gets In The Way . . . Again

The good news is you get a view from above right down the avenue. The bad news is you have to cut back all those damn trees:

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.

. . .

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.”

How Do Deer Get To Staten Island?

It’s not the start of a joke. They swim:

Apparently, the deer population in Staten Island has been going up, and Friday, for the first time, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation will release its first ever count of deer in the borough.

And these clever creatures aren’t taking the ferry or Verrazano like the rest of us, they’re swimming over.

“We suspect that they they are swimming over from New Jersey, deer are strong swimmers and the Arthur Kill is a narrow body of water,” said Arturo Garcia-Costas, of the NYSDEC.

The Luxury Of Trees

So at this rate, it will only take $545 million more to reach the lofty goal of 1 million new trees:

David Rockefeller and Mayor Michael Bloomberg — two of the city’s biggest philanthropists — spent yesterday afternoon in front of East Harlem’s Thomas Jefferson public housing complex, where they planted a rosebud tree. They hope it is just one of many.

Rockefeller gave $5 million to help fund the mayor’s initiative to plant 1 million trees as part of PlaNYC, his sustainability agenda for the city. Bloomberg matched Rockefeller’s gift with his own $5 million.

“We’re all in this together,” Bloomberg said. “We shouldn’t wait for others to do it.” Not only do the trees provide shade and clean the air, he said, they “also improve property values.”

The $10 million announced yesterday will cover the cost of 18,000 new trees, “nearly three-quarters of all the trees in Central Park,” Bloomberg said.

. . .

He expects to have 250,000 of the 1 million trees in the ground before he leaves office. But then what? The initiative is funded by charitable donations and has no legal mandate.

“They should plant jobs,” added Olga Bernabi, who works at the Jefferson Houses library. “I know a lot of people getting pink slips.”

Central Park has 26,000 trees in 840 acres (31 trees an acre). New York City (at 322 square miles) has 206,080 total acres — 1 million new trees means adding 4.8 trees to each acre of land in the city. A city block is 2.5 acres. That’s 12 new trees on each city block . . . in addition to the 592,130 street trees, which have stocked city streets to 73% capacity, with room for 220,000 more trees. So then there are 780,000 left to be accounted for . . . um, has anyone figured out where all the new trees will go? And don’t tell us that this will simply replace old trees because that’s just cooking the books . . .

Who’s The Boss Here, Them Or Us?

How to change a lightbulb on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge:

. . . Two carry up a 50-pound red beacon light fixture, while the third distracts a peregrine falcon with a mean streak, lest it rip them all to pieces with its sharp talons.

By the way, all this requires sidestepping piles of pigeon heads, as the predatory falcons seem to have a habit of eating everything but.

. . .

The electricians usually make about 20 bulb-changing trips a year among the beacon lights, red “obstruction lights” on the cables and the bridge’s 340-plus decorative white “necklace lights.”

But burned-out bulbs have been a less-frequent occurrence these days, with the Verrazano the first MTA bridge to break in new ultra-efficient LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs.

With a life span of between five and 11 years, the new bulbs, which so far have replaced those in only the required red lights, already have decreased energy consumption by 90 percent, according to Maintenance Superintendent Charles Passarella.

With any luck, the new bulbs will mean fewer emergency trips to the top, and fewer dangerous run-ins with the falcon, which is particularly aggressive during mating season.

“Once they lay eggs around June, we can’t go up,” [MTA senior bridge and tunnel maintainer Kenny] Dybing said. “We don’t want to interfere with the process.”

Before the eggs hatch around early July, the male falcon is usually fairly well-mannered, but “the mother gets very protective,” Dybing said.

If a critical red light goes out during that window of time, the men go up with Chris Nadareski, a biologist and falcon expert from the city Department of Environmental Protection. Nadareski, who wears protective clothing, and is well-versed in falcon behavior, is able to distract the mother while the lights are changed, Dybing said.

“The same pair returns every year to breed,” Passarella said. The birds are banded so biologists can track their movements. Babies hatched on the Verrazano have been found far up the Hudson River.

Location Scout: Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.