CALLING IN THE B TEAM
The Police Officer Whose Job Is a Buzz
As of 2018, there were approximately 35,000 police officers in the New York City Police Department. These NYPD officers serve many different roles; there is a bomb squad, an anti-gang unit, a team focused on drug infractions, another team that deals only with public transportation, and, of course, a counterterrorism unit. Many other officers are more generalists, assigned to an area—a “precinct”—and expected to cover a variety of issues.
However, what unit you are in doesn’t necessarily dictate what job you fill. Similarly, your home precinct may not be the only place you work. For these types of jobs—the ones that require a special hand—the NYPD may call in the B Team. Or, more accurately, the “bee” team. Yes, the NYPD has an on-staff beekeeper. Two, actually, and the role hasn’t been without the buzz of controversy over its nearly twenty-five years.
The role began in February 1994, when an officer named Anthony Planakis applied to join the force. He listed a curious hobby on his resume: He was an avid beekeeper. As Planakis told NPR, beekeeping was in his blood; he was a fourth-generation beekeeper, himself having first engaged with the buzzing insects in 1977. Surprisingly, this hobby came in handy nearly immediately when his sergeant assigned him to wrangle some bees in Harlem just weeks after he took the job. By the winter of 1995, he was the department’s unofficial beekeeper, taking on the nickname “Tony Bees.”
For nearly twenty years, Planakis was the on-call guy whenever a New Yorker called the police to deal with a bee infestation. However, the unofficial position came with a problem: ambiguity. When Planakis removed hordes of bees from afflicted homes and businesses and their surroundings, those bees became the property of the NYPD. But, as Planakis told Gothamist, it wasn’t clear what he should do with those bees, as “there was no one else qualified to handle [the bees] and no procedure in place” for their relocation. Planakis claims that he’d give the bees to beekeepers he knew without taking any remuneration from them.
Unfortunately, many at the NYPD didn’t believe him, instead accusing him of either keeping the bees for himself (he had his own hive from which he harvested honey) or selling them to friends. Planakis vehemently denied this and the police department never investigated him, but the damage was done. He left the force in 2014, telling the media that this undue scrutiny from superiors pushed him into early retirement—although he does come back on occasion to help out with an errant swarm or two.
While the department originally intended to retire the unofficial beekeeper role after Planakis left, plans changed in early 2015. The department instead decided to formalize the position. That summer, it named a counterterrorism detective, Daniel Higgins, and a Queens police officer, Darren Mays, as co-beekeepers. The NYPD has resolved the ambiguities that ended Planakis’s career early; as the New York Post reported, “Higgins and Mays aren’t paid extra for their beekeeping duties, but they get to keep the bees for their own use.”