The Secret Life of the New York Times Bees

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It was a hot, sticky Thursday in June, and New York City was buzzing from the energy of a wildly improbable Knicks comeback in the N.B.A. finals.

Seven blocks from Madison Square Garden, on a rooftop above the fourth floor of the New York Times Building, a group of small, improbable residents were also abuzz: some 60,000 Italian honeybees.

High above Midtown Manhattan, they crawled around two wooden hives (one sepia-colored, one honey-toned), flying in and out of the entrances and, on one hive, spilling off the facade in a sort of bee cascade. Two beekeepers in protective clothing and hoods inspected the frames, where the bees make honey and each hive’s queen lays her eggs. The bees had been living, and working, at The Times’s headquarters for nearly a year.

Their residency began, in some ways, with a leak in the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

Patrick McGeehan, a reporter on the Metro desk who covers infrastructure, was assigned to write about the leak in 2024 after a drilling crew accidentally pierced a hole in the tunnel. As he worked to track down sources, he found a dash cam video two men had posted, showing water pouring down as they drove through in their company van.

“I had to track those guys down to interview them,” Mr. McGeehan recalled, “and it turned out that they were beekeepers.”

Learning that, before the drive, the beekeepers — employees of a company called Best Bees — had been tending hives on a terrace adjacent to the Chrysler Building, Mr. McGeehan sensed another story.

He shadowed the pair, Titus Ogilvie-Laing and Matthew Flood, on another visit to those hives, which were owned by the Danish Consulate. Mr. McGeehan watched the beekeepers blow smoke into the hives to calm the bees and pry the frames out of the hive boxes. He even stuck his finger into the bees’ honey to test the keepers’ claim that the bees wouldn’t bother him if he did. (They did not.)

And, in his research, he discovered that other New York City businesses, looking to burnish their sustainability credentials by adding pollinators to the area, had also installed beehives. There were even some at the Empire State Building and Madison Square Garden.

His resulting story on urban beekeepers published in November 2024. Gwynne Wardrop, The Times’s executive director of cultural events and experiences, found the article soon after.

“I was reading it, and I was just fascinated,” she said. “And literally, I said to myself, ‘Well, why don’t we have bees?’”

Victor Liu, The Times’s vice president for real estate and facilities, remembered when Ms. Wardrop approached him about the project. “Gwynne saw me in the hallway, and she said, ‘Hey, I’m going to send an email about bees. So just, heads-up.’”

In pitching the idea, Ms. Wardrop noted, there was some politicking involved. Some people, she said, were “a little wary” about the bees, “afraid people are going to freak out.”

But she persisted. “We all hear the stories about how bees are dying off and suffering, and we really need people all around the world to be helping provide them safe harbor,” Ms. Wardrop said. Anything that could be done to help as a company, she added, “is a good thing.”

Eventually, she said, “everybody got kind of delighted by it and went along for the ride.”

Finally, in June 2025, two beekeepers from Best Bees arrived at the Times rooftop and installed the two beehives, each with thousands of residents.

Since then, the bees have had ups and downs, all tracked and recorded by the beekeepers. They visit regularly to check on the health of the queens and the colonies, look for signs of disease, test for mite infection rates, and add or remove boxes according to the hives’ population size. The hives haven’t yet produced much excess honey.

In the past year, one hive has grown immensely. Feeding on pollen from trees in parks, flowers on balconies and even weeds in the cracks of sidewalks, those bees — now an estimated 36,000 of them — have thrived. With that population, the hive’s forager bees could be visiting an estimated 11.9 million flowers per day, according to Best Bees’ projections.

The other hive did not fare as well. Both hives struggled through a long, cold winter, and the bees were afflicted with dysentery. While the left-hand hive recovered, this one did not: When the beekeepers visited in early April, they discovered that many of the bees inside had died.

On their next check-in, the beekeepers saved the surviving bees; put them into a new, sanitized box; and then installed that hive atop another new, healthy hive.

The key material placed between those two adjoining layers to bring the bees together? Newspaper.

“If we had just added those 50 bees into the hive right away, without the newspaper, they would say, ‘Hey, that’s not my queen,’ and they might try to kill her,” Nola Oner, Best Bees’ director of products and programming, said. “So they have to be separated to say, ‘Oh, I’m starting to get used to her scent and her pheromones. That is my queen.’ And then they’ll just eat through the newspaper and join the colony.”

By the June visit, the bees had chewed through the newspaper and formed one healthy hive, some 24,000 strong. Elena Getsios, who was inspecting the frames, turned from that hive with a smile. “They’re good,” she reported. “They’re still a little small. They’re in the bottom box still, and they’re slowly getting into the top box.”

The left-hand hive, on the other hand, was going almost too strong. Bees were cascading off the front — or, in beekeeper parlance, “bearding.”

A familiar face was tending that hive: Mr. Ogilvie-Laing, one of the beekeepers from the tunnel.

“I’m a little worried that they might swarm,” he said of the busy hive, “so I’m taking a bunch away.”

He gathered the excess bees in a plastic box to take them back to Best Bees’ rooftop apiary in Queens. Once that group raised a new queen, they could be installed elsewhere, or used to fix another struggling hive.

With the hive checks complete, Ms. Getsios and Mr. Ogilvie-Laing headed to the elevator, smoker and bee box in hand. It was 94 degrees but felt hotter on the rooftops. They were going to call it a day.

Midway through the elevator ride, Mr. Ogilvie-Laing reached over and picked a stray bee off Ms. Getsios’ hood, capturing the insect inside his hand.

Asked where it would go, he replied, “We’ll put her outside. She’ll find her way home.”

Outside, he carefully opened his hand atop a pole near the loading dock. Slowly, the bee unfurled itself and flew off.