Good morning. Today we’ll look at why the city is putting “bee hotels” in some plazas and Open Streets areas. We’ll also get details on a no-confidence vote against the president of Columbia University.
New York City is getting seven hotels that won’t take reservations. They won’t put chocolates on the pillow at night — they won’t have pillows. Or beds, bathrooms or TripAdvisor ratings.
They are “bee hotels” intended to attract an at-risk population — smallish native bees that do not always find habitats in urban areas. The bee hotel installations will serve as stopovers between green spaces.
But not just for a night or two. The female bees will lay eggs in them and leave food so that the bees that hatch can grow over the summer.
The bee hotels look like birdhouses. They are going up in plazas and in Open Streets areas that are the domain of the city Department of Transportation. Officials from the agency and from the Horticultural Society of New York — which maintains the flower beds in 30 plazas, 25 Open Streets areas and various other public spaces around the city — say passers-by should not worry about being stung. The species that will be drawn to the bee hotels “never or very rarely sting,” a spokesman for the department said.
“These are ones that if you leave them alone, they leave you alone,” he said.
Sara Hobel, the executive director of the Horticultural Society, echoed that. “Most of the time in places like New York City, you are actually stung by a yellow jacket,” she said. “It’s a wasp, it’s not a bee, but there’s a general misconception.”
It is not the only misconception about the species of bees for which the hotels are intended, she said. These bees do not nest in hives, so worker bees protecting the queen will not fly out in swarms. The bees that will use the hotels are “solitary nesters,” she said. They are also native to New York, unlike honeybees, which she said are imported from Europe and are not in short supply.
Kimberly Russell, an associate professor at Rutgers University, said that putting up bee hotels amounted to “giving bees the resources they need to move around the city and pollinate our flowers.” Bee hotels are filled with materials like reeds and bamboo where females can leave the larvae.
“Most bee species cannot live in hives, so we need to give them other materials to build their homes,” she said. “In cities the limiting factor is where they can build their nests. Even if you provide food, they’re not necessarily going to thrive.”
Bees need the assistance that bee hotels can provide because there is concern about declines in bee populations. A three-year study of pollinators in New York State, conducted by Cornell University experts and released in 2022, found that up to 24 percent of pollinator bees are at risk. An additional 11 percent may have been wiped out, the study said.
Russell will lead a study of the bee hotels and “bee bunkers,” in-ground nesting places that will go in flower beds in plazas. “Part of the science of this project is seeing which bees colonize the hotels,” she said. “One of the things that makes this tricky is that urban bees are going to be different in behavior than bees in a rural or suburban setting. We don’t know which bees are going to be coming to the hotels or bunkers.”
One study will involve marking bees in the hotels with biodegradable colored spots. That will let the researchers estimate how many bees check in and where else they go, if they are observed outside the hotel where they were tagged. The Horticultural Society schedules a “Bee Jubilee” every summer where New Yorkers can volunteer to look for marked bees.
There is nothing new about bee hotels. The racecar driver Sebastian Vettel helped students in Austria build one — in the shape of a Formula 1 car — to demonstrate the importance of providing a nesting place for bees that need comfortable short-term accommodations.
But bee hotels may appeal to more than bees. A study published in 2015 based on a survey of almost 600 bee hotels in Toronto found that wasps were “significantly more abundant” than bees — almost three-quarters of the bee hotels were occupied by wasps.
Hobel, of the Horticultural Society, acknowledged that “other things go in” when bee hotels go up. She mentioned a photograph that someone had sent of a hoverfly at a bee hotel. She also mentioned spiders.
“My reaction is, so?” Hobel said. “Spiders are good, too. It’s nothing terrible that’s going to be in there. Something good will be nesting in these be hotels. It’s not a rat.”
Weather
Expect partly sunny skies with temperatures in the low 70s. In the evening, temperatures will drop to the high 50s.
A no-confidence vote at Columbia
Faculty members at Columbia University’s College of Arts and Sciences passed a no-confidence resolution against the school’s president, Nemat Shafik.
The resolution said that she had violated “fundamental requirements of academic freedom and shared governance.” The resolution also accused her of an “unprecedented assault on students’ rights.”
The move was largely symbolic. But my colleague Sharon Otterman writes that it reflected the anger that Shafik faces for her handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, as well as her promise to a congressional committee last month that she would discipline several faculty members who had expressed views against Israel — views that some argued were antisemitic.
The resolution criticized Shafik’s decision to call the police into campus to clear a pro-Palestinian student encampment on April 18 after the university’s executive committee had told her not to. The resolution said that she had “falsely claimed” that the students were a “clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the university.” The resolution quoted a police official as saying the students had been “saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
METROPOLITAN diary
The Bus Driver
Dear Diary:
I was eight and a half months pregnant. My feet were swollen and I had two big shopping bags in either hand as I waited for the M98 bus to Washington Heights.
The temperature was in the 90s, and it was rush hour. One bus that stopped was so packed it wasn’t taking any passengers.
Fifteen minutes passed before another packed bus arrived. This time I got on.
A man was sitting in a seat reserved for older and disabled people.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the driver said. “You’re going to have to get up. I have a pregnant lady coming onboard.”
