NBD, Just Thousands Of Bees Swarming A Hot Dog Stand In Times Square

A hive of bees swarmed a Times Square hot dog stand and LOL, no thanks

Hey, Times Square visitors — how badly do you want a hot dog? Enough to fend off a literal SWARM of thousands of bees? Because that’s exactly the kind of fortitude you’d have to posess if you tried buying one from a bee-coated stand yesterday in what could only be described as my literal nightmare.

The other day, I tried opening my trunk at the grocery store to load in my eight cases of La Croix (shut up, don’t judge me) and one persistent bee floating around was enough to ward me off until it flew away. One bee was all it took to make me consider a life without a vehicle and then there’s this dude, literally vacuuming 40,000 of them off a Times Square hot dog stand yesterday.

HOW ABOUT NOPE.

Authorities had to cordon off whole blocks surrounding this very unlucky Sabrett stand at the corner of Broadway and West 43rd Street, AKA, Broadway and Absolutely Not Street.

And today, along with being the day I learn that you can vacuum up bees by the hundreds, is also the day I learn that the NYPD has a whole bee division. Now where’s the Wasp SWAT Team is what I’d like to know. The guy in the video is Officer Michael Lauriano, one of the beekeepers of the NYPD.

Yup, the NYPD has two official beekeepers according to CNN, and one of them, Officer Darren Mays, has an explanation as to why this hot dog stand looked like something out of a future plague for a good few hours. “The hive got overcrowded because it was hot and humid and they just needed a new place to go so they can keep cool,” he says. Mays called it an absconded hive. I call it an LOL NO THANKS.

Like, I can completely sympathize with wanting to escape the summer heat. But I’m sorry, buzzy little friends, that hot dog stand belongs to us humans. Please stick to flowers and making me look like a shrill douchebag at my daughter’s softball game.

Lauriano carefully vacuumed up the bees and safely transferred them to a hive box where they were then loaded onto a police van for a trip to an apiary in Long Island. “Unfortunately, they won’t be able to make any honey this season,” Mays explains. He says they’ll have to be well-fed all winter to stay alive, but it looks like they just had a tidy meal of hot dogs, so I’m sure they’ll be fine.

Mays tells Scary Mommy that he’s very surprised the video went viral as this isn’t really a new thing for he and Lauriano. “We’ve had many swarms that happened there and I had one that happened on Father’s Day that I tweeted about and it didn’t draw this kind of attention. We were really caught off guard because it’s so late in the season and they usually don’t swarm around this time,” he explains.

Thankfully, the NYBeeD (see what I did there?) says all’s clear for now and New Yorkers can return to Times Square without the worry of encountering an entire hive of bees.