Classifying this bee ownership as a “hobby” simplifies the problem: it’s not ethical to pursue a recreational activity that puts unwilling third parties in nonspeculative danger, regardless of the legality. It would be more complicated if your daughter and son-in-law were financially dependent on the bees’ honey production, but even in that situation, keeping the […]

A new method for monitoring the decline in bee populations may prove a useful tool in much-needed conservation efforts. It requires only a few hundred pan traps: bright shallow bowls partly filled with soapy water or propylene glycol. Reuters A bumblebee gathering pollen from a sunflower. When United Nations experts noticed that crop production was […]

ZOMBIE bees? That’s right: zombie bees. First reported in California in 2008, these stranger-than-fiction creatures have spread to North Dakota and, just recently, to my home in Washington State. Of course, they’re not really zombies, although they act disquietingly like them, showing abnormal behavior like flying at night (almost unheard-of in healthy bees), moving erratically […]

Julian Stratenschulte/European Pressphoto AgencyA bee in a German beer garden in March. Scientists’ concerns over the fate of the world’s bees appear to be sinking in. LONDON — It’s been another bad year for bees. Both excess rainfall and drought in various parts of Europe have reduced honey production by as much as 90 percent, […]

Mr. Russell was entrusted with designing bronze gates, 7 feet high and 6 feet wide, at the Ninth Avenue Station in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. The gates depict honeybees crawling on hives, and the posts of adjacent fences will have honeybees resting on 17 finials shaped like flower heads. The gates are expected […]

It’s been a busy spring for the hardworking honeybee and the keepers tending to hives in New York City and the region. With warmer winter temperatures and an unusually early spring, bees have been in reproductive overdrive to take in the spring nectar flow, occasionally creating swarms in very public and inconvenient places around town. […]

Four hives lovingly maintained by fifth-graders at the Brooklyn Waldorf School in Bedford-Stuyvesant. — Bob Maynard, Brooklyn

Emily S. Rueb/The New York TimesThe Rev. Mark S. Sisk, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, blessed about 15,000 bees on Tuesday morning. On Tuesday morning, witnesses to a ceremony at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine were encouraged to wear long sleeves, long pants and socks. The subjects of […]

This Week’s Assignment Kids Draw the News Children depict current events. Emily S. Rueb/The New York Times Swarms of honeybees seem to be everywhere in New York City these days — on cars, on trees, outside restaurants — as fast-growing colonies take off in search of new homes. Experts say the swarms may be a […]

Are You a Beekeeper? Show Us Your Hives » The bees and their keepers are coming out of hiding. Since the decade-long ban on keeping Apis mellifera, the common honeybee, was lifted in New York City two years ago, hundreds of buzzing boxes have appeared on rooftops and balconies and in backyards across the city. […]