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, reports the New York Times.com.

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.

‘Bee good!’ an officer called out to a reporter. It was the third bee swarm the officer said he had seen in the last year.

Walid Elfaramawy, 38, who for 10 years has worked at a food stand opposite where the bees alighted, said he had never seen anything like Tuesday’s swarm in Times Square. It started at a construction site at 43rd Street and Broadway, he said, and made its way to the umbrella.

The man of the hour was Officer Michael Lauriano, one of the Police Department’s beekeepers, who sucked up the insects with a large vacuum cleaner as a crowd of tourists craned their necks to see.

The swarm briefly captivated Twitter in New York City, but such incidents are common enough that the Police Department keeps beekeepers on hand, who have their own verified Twitter page.

Andrew Coté, a Midtown beekeeper who was watching the hubbub, estimated the swarm had as many as 15,000 to 20,000 bees. ‘You have to count the legs and divide by six,’ he joked.

In most cases, Coté said, the swarms come from beehives that some New Yorkers keep on the rooftops of buildings.

‘There are beehives within one block of here. In fact, there are at least a dozen hives within a block of here,’ Coté said.

Beekeeping in the city is not an uncommon pastime. An entire organization, The New York City Beekeeper’s Association, keeps track of beekeepers, who are legally required to register their hives.

As bee populations struggle globally, urban beekeeping is on the rise. Midtown hotels use the colonies to produce honey for cocktails, and hives help pollinate the city’s parks. It’s normal for the bees to travel, sometimes up to three miles, from their homes to keep the city’s green spaces green.

‘They haven’t escaped, because they’re free to go,’ Coté said of the bees. ‘They’re free range.’

Incidents like Tuesday’s are often blamed on sloppy beekeeping, Coté said. But holding inept beekeepers accountable for swarms is all but impossible, he added.

Swarms are usually limited to the spring months. But a rash of unseasonably warm weather may have inspired the queen bee to abandon her hive and take thousands of her worker bees with her, Coté said.

‘I think they wanted a hot dog,’ he said.