Hordes of people eagerly watched an NYPD officer-turned-beekeeper remove the insects from a stall ... with a vacuum 
 
 Productivity came to a halt across New York City offices on Tuesday afternoon, as hordes of people eagerly followed the removal of 20,000 bees from a hotdog stand. 
 
 The bees had swarmed the hotdog stand, a block south of Times Square, around 1pm. 
 
 Thousands watched a Reuters livestream – the stand is located outside the news agency’s New York headquarters – and followed on Twitter as a police officer was called in to remove the bees. With a vacuum cleaner. 
 
 A section of the street at the corner of 42nd Street and 7th Avenue was closed as the delicate procedure took place. 
 
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 Officers from the New York police department stood guard, some more willingly than others, as one of their colleagues donned a beekeeper’s hat and approached the hotdog stand. 
 
 The bees had gathered in a densely packed, roughly 15-square-foot clump, and the unidentified officer, who wore a white jacket, thick gloves and has a moustache, proceeded to vacuum up the bees. The bee cleansing took about 40 minutes, much of which was watched online. 
 
 By around 3pm, the officer, who told journalists he “has training”, had removed the bulk of the bees, but many remained in the area, swarming around a selection of soft drinks displayed on the hotdog stall. 
 
 Asked if it was safe to remain in the area, a uniformed police officer pointed to his colleague and said: “He’s sucking them up.” He added: “There’ll be no more problems.” 
 
 Andrew Coté, who runs the New York City beekeepers’ association, had answered a call from the NYPD and was watching as the bees were removed. Removal by vacuum cleaner – it was a specially adapted vacuum cleaner – was common, Coté said. He estimated there were 20,000 bees on the umbrella, but said: “You’ve got to count the legs and divide by six to be sure.” 
 
 Coté said of the bees’ motivation: “I think they wanted a hotdog.” 
 
 Under further questioning, Coté clarified that he was joking about the bees wanting a hotdog, and instead this late-August swarm had likely occurred because of an ill-managed beehive. He said there were a number of hives within a block of the hotdog stand. 
 
 
 
 By 3.15pm police had re-opened the street, although a number of bees were still on the scene. Coté chastised the Guardian for ducking as some of the bees flew past. 
 
 “You won’t die,” Coté said. “Unless you’re anaphylactic.” 

 New York (CNN) Times Square was a hive of activity Tuesday afternoon, as more than 40,000 bees swarmed a hot dog stand at the corner of Broadway and West 43rd Street. 
 
 Known as an absconded hive, the bees were looking for a new home to escape the sweltering heat, said Officer Darren Mays, one of the New York Police Department's two official beekeepers. 
 
 "The hive got overcrowded because it was hot and humid and they just needed a new place to go so they can keep cool," Mays said. He also runs the official NYPD Bees Twitter account, which was buzzing with likes and retweets as many New Yorkers learned that their police force had beekeepers on staff. 
 
 Much like New Yorkers, in the summer the bees feel that the hive is just too....crowded. So they take off for a little relocation. https://t.co/7ZJJfAxBzR — NYPD Bees (@NYPDBees) August 28, 2018 
 
 Mays said the bees likely went looking for a new home after leaving one of the rooftop hives of a nearby building. 
 
 Second-beekeeper-in-command, Officer Michael Lauriano, responded to the scene in full protective gear, including a netted bee helmet. It took Lauriano 45 minutes to carefully vacuum the bees. The street was cordoned off and no injuries were reported, according to the NYPD. 
 
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 Thousands of bees swarmed part of Times Square on Tuesday afternoon, sending tourists and passers-by scrambling before the bees settled on the cart of a very unhappy hot-dog vendor at 43rd Street and Broadway. 
 
 The mass of insects was so dense it weighed down sections of the stand’s umbrella. The vendor, visibly agitated, had nothing to say about the visitation of Apis mellifera. 
 
 The incident lasted all of an hour before the New York Police Department’s own beekeeping team vacuumed up the horde of honeybees and took them safely to a new location. In their brief brush with fame, the bees attracted hundreds of onlookers and inspired some embarrassingly bad jokes by police officers.
– Some 20,000 bees swarmed a hot dog cart near Times Square in New York on Tuesday afternoon, the Guardian reports. But the real news may be that the NYPD has its own beekeeping team. And, per the New York Times, it gets a fair amount of action, with one officer—who yelled "bee good!" to a reporter—saying it's the third bee swarm he's seen in a year. As bystanders looked on (both in person and via a Reuters livestream), NYPD beekeeper Officer Michael Lauriano, dressed in appropriate attire, used a vacuum to remove the swarm, a procedure that took some 40 minutes and was finished up around 3pm, per the Guardian. In a phenomenon known as an "absconded hive," the bees were in search of a place to get out of the heat, Officer Darren Mays, NYPD's other official beekeeper, tells CNN. "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, adding that the captured bees are safe in a hive box and headed to an apiary on Long Island. No injuries were reported, authorities say. In any event, there was no true danger posed by the bees, "unless you're anaphylactic," Andrew Cote, a civilian beekeeper on the scene, tells the Guardian. And if you're curious about how they came up with the estimate of 20,000 bees: "You have to count the legs and divide by six," Cote says.