If you’ve noticed more bees zipping and swarming along the Mosholu Parkway greenway, you’re not imagining things.
The Risse Street Community Garden, at the corner of Risse Street and Grand Concourse just tipping Mosholu Parkway, is now home to thousands of honeybees working to pollinate the plants in the community garden and beyond.
The hive was installed in April by resident beekeeper Brendan O’Regan, a contractor by trade. “I would have done this years ago if I had a place to put them, absolutely,” O’Regan said. “I didn’t know anything about keeping bees, but I did know that it wasn’t rocket science.”
O’Regan is one of five committee members who oversee the community garden. He recently brought the idea of adding the beehive after attending a beekeeping training seminar on Randall’s Island, learning about the benefits of bees and their honey.
The vote wasn’t unanimous, and O’Regan said many of his fellow gardeners were apprehensive or afraid of sharing their space with the bees. “Generally, the bees that sting you when you’re a kid are not honeybees–they’re yellow jacket wasps or bumblebees, and many people don’t realize that,” O’Regan said.
But some of the gardeners were swayed by the prospect of sharing the honey bounty at the end of the season. Once O’Regan’s idea got a majority vote, he invested $500 of his own money to get the hive up and running. “There’s no catch to it,” O’Regan said of his intention to operate a hive. “Let everyone benefit from it.”
The bees have been hard at work the last two months building up wax cells on the plastic molds in the hive. Every two or three days, O’Regan dons a beekeeper’s hat, opens up the hive and feeds the bees a mixture of sugar and honey to increase wax production. The hive started with 10,000 honeybees, and O’Regan estimates the number is now at 25,000.
The bees likely won’t produce much honey this first year, but if the winter is mild and the bees survive, the hive could produce anywhere from 50 to 80 pounds of honey in 2017. Volunteer gardeners plan to share the nectar among themselves.
City Hall overturned a decade-long ban on working with honeybees in 2010. Now, those who want to be bee owners just have to register their hive with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
A Health Department spokesman told the Norwood News that there are 98 registered beehives in the city this year, with five of those hives in the Bronx.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.