Three Million Bees Removed from House in NYC
A homeowner in Queens is answering questions as to how he was able to let his bee keeping hobby become such a big problem.
New York City officials revealed that one house in a residential neighborhood in Queens had nearly 3 million bees, which lived in one of the 45 hives found on the property.
The man responsible for the bees said that it started out as a hobby and over the past two years and just grew out of control.
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"It's gotten out of hand … I don't have the time or resources to do this … I used to be a beekeeper in mainland China, that's all I want to do," Yi Gin Chen told The Daily News.
While beekeeping became legal in the city in 2010, experts still caution that you should enlist the help of someone with experience in handling bees instead of going about it alone.
"All rules of good urban beekeeping and of common sense have been ignored here," Andrew Cote, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association, told reporters.
"I thought I've seen it all in urban beekeeping and this surprised me," he added.
Beekeepers don't need licenses, but all beehives must be registered with the city and owners who don't register their hives face fines of up to $2,000 each.
Cote and other beekeepers put a screen around each of the hives to make sure the bees were not able to escape.
"They're in such poor health right now… there's no way they would survive the winter in this condition," Cote said.
NYPD Detective Tony Planakis stated that the bees were going to be taken to an undisclosed location.
"This is ridiculous," Chen's daughter, who declined to give her name, told the Daily News. "They come here without our permission and just took them away from us."
A spokeswoman for the Health Department, which regulates beekeeping, had no comment.
