Helping Bees Find New Homes Across New York City, From Fresh Kills to Street Planters

Tucked away in Brooklyn’s Calvert Vaux Park near Coney Island, one of the largest bee habitats in the city was once a rose garden, full of ornamental “Knock Out roses,” which are not native to the region.

Now, replanted with mountain mint, coneflowers and milkweed, a pollinator garden attracts a variety of bees and birds and other fertilizing animals, and enthralls locals.

“A lot of times, ornamentalists—like myself—go to places and focus on what looks really nice right now,” said Anil Chandrakumar, a lively city Department of Parks and Recreation supervisor. “This garden was designed to bridge that gap between beauty but also environmental benefit.”

The garden is part of the department’s Pollinator Place program, which encourages the planting of pollinator-friendly species and has built 23 pollinator gardens across the city since 2021. 

Meanwhile, horticulturalists at nonprofits, like the New York Restoration Project and The Horticultural Society of New York, create and maintain small private gardens that support bees, butterflies and other pollinators, as well as street planters, some of which have been fitted with bee “hotels” to serve the native bee population.

Pollinators are essential for the reproduction of flowering plants, transferring genetic material between them that enables fertilization, which leads to the production of seeds and fruit. 

“Whenever we do any sort of renovation project, we’re always looking towards native plants that provide ecosystem services, like attracting insects, pollinators, attracting wildlife,” said Jason Sheets, the New York Restoration Project’s director of community garden operations and citywide greening projects.

But many native bee species in New York are in decline, part of a global problem. A 2022 New York pollinator survey found that, in a conservative estimate, 38 percent of the native pollinators that were studied are at risk of regional extinction, with flies and bees the most at risk. 

Fears abound among horticulturalists concerning the potential impacts of climate change on these already vulnerable insects. Bees lose habitat to urban development and suffer from the spread of parasitic mites, which have led to widespread colony collapse, particularly among honeybees. 

Climate change worsens the situation—weather events like extreme rainfall can limit bees’ foraging opportunities, while floods and wildfires destroy their habitats. Some evidence suggests that, if temperatures get warmer earlier in the year, flowers could bloom before bees leave their winter nest, reducing their opportunities for pollination. 

At Calvert Vaux Park, five years after Chandrakumar and his colleagues reimagined and replanted the garden, native species like mountain mint have proved resilient. Chandrakumar has even noticed that the native species can sometimes outcompete weeds like mugwort—thus requiring less maintenance.

“Our work in this garden has reduced a lot each year since that initial planting in 2020,” said Chandrakumar. “We’ve been able to reduce the mugwort in this bed naturally without ever having to use herbicides again.” 

Herbicides are noteworthy in any discussion of pollinators in New York City.

In 2023, New York State Attorney General Letitia James struck a $6.9 million settlement with Bayer Crop Science and Monsanto Co. over their advertising claims that glyphosate, in their pesticide Roundup, was non-toxic. In 2021, the City Council banned the use of chemical pesticides on New York City property.  

Glyphosate has been used widely on corn and soy fields across the country because those crops are genetically engineered to be resistant to it. But the herbicide can kill everything else in its path, including the monarch butterfly’s main food source during its long migration from northern U.S. states and Canada and through California to Mexico. 

“It drifted off of the fields and devastated all the milkweed across the mid-continent,” said Arturo Garcia-Costas, the New York Community Trust program director for local, national and international environment. 

The decline has been precipitous over the past two decades—the monarch butterfly also suffers from habitat loss. 

The yearly California monarch count by volunteers for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation counted a peak population of 9,119 monarchs this past winter. In 1997, volunteers counted a total of 1.2 million monarchs in the state. 

From James’ settlement, $3.2 million went to organizations across the state for pollinator conservation efforts through a partnership between the attorney general’s office and Garcia Costas’ nonprofit. The New York Community Trust picked the grantees and contributed $573,000 of those funds. 

In Jamaica Bay, Assessing Pollinators

One of those grant recipients, the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy, was awarded $200,000 to be disbursed over two years. The nonprofit helps manage the parks in and around the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens through partnerships with city, state and federal agencies. 

The money will be used, according to Terri Carta, the executive director of the nonprofit, to enhance pollinator habitat by weeding invasives and planting native species across multiple sites. In Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, a mecca for regional birders made up of wetlands and salt marshes, Carta also wants to conduct a biodiversity study at the pollinator garden there to better understand the local ecosystem. 

“We want to know what’s there now, and then be able to create that baseline for future monitoring of pollinators that use that habitat,” she said.

The conservancy will also use the funds to support the three-acre Marian S. Heiskell Native Plant Nursery on Floyd Bennett Field, which sits right above the Rockaway Peninsula and was created by the conservancy in partnership with the city’s parks department, the National Park Service and the Natural Areas Conservancy. 

“Right after Superstorm Sandy, there was a lot of restoration needed, but there was not sufficient plant stock of native plants for beach grasses and beach dunes—the kinds of habitats that we have around here that are also very important for pollinators,” said Carta. 

The conservancy plans to support the nursery’s efforts to propagate native pollinator plants, which will then be planted in gardens across the city. Her nonprofit will also run education programs for the local community out of a nearby building.

In Fresh Kills, the Return of Butterflies 

Another grantee from James’ Roundup settlement is the Freshkills Park Alliance, which will receive $150,000 over two years. 

Before New York City’s trash was trucked and ferried out of the city to landfills and incinerators across the surrounding region, it was transported, via barge, to Fresh Kills, the Staten Island landfill. Fresh Kills’ mounds accumulated approximately 150 million tons of solid waste before the landfill finally closed in 2001. 

The landfill was then turned into a park by capping the trash with plastic and pouring tons of clean soil over the area. Now, the landfill mounds appear as tall, rolling hills, towering over the various creeks, grasslands and wetlands across the area. The North Park has been open to the public since 2021, while the rest of the area will be available in 2026. 

According to the Freshkills Park Alliance, a nonprofit that cares for the park, it contains the largest grassland environment in the region, making it the perfect habitat for the regal fritillary, a butterfly that has not been seen in New York state for decades. The state lists the butterfly as endangered and possibly regionally extinct. 

Now, the Freshkills Park Alliance, with its Roundup grant, will conduct research and create the habitat to make reintroduction possible, and to attract all kinds of pollinators to the area.

“We’re going to be planting native violets, and we’re also going to be planting native sunflowers and native thistle species,” said José Ramírez-Garofalo, the director of the Freshkills Biological Station and director of science and research development for the Freshkills Park Alliance. “This is one of the most important grassland habitats in northeastern North America.”

Across the City, Street Planters

Long before Fresh Kills became a park and Anil Chandrakumar got rid of the roses and turned Calvert Vaux Park into a pollinator habitat in Brooklyn, bees in New York City called street planters home. 

The Horticultural Society of New York, known as the Hort, has been tending to planters and urban green spaces, or “streetscapes,” for decades. Their planters often cater not just to local residents who want some color added to their section of the concrete jungle, but also to the city’s pollinators, with a diversity of flowering native and ornamental plants.

“Plants in our city are, as far as we’re concerned, as essential as transportation or schools or any of the other things that help keep our city so vital,” said Sara Hobel, the executive director of the Hort. “Those streetscapes are something that the whole Hort feels very strongly ought to be able to sustain plant life. We shouldn’t just confine our efforts to have a greener city to parkland and other large pieces of land—plants should be everywhere.”

The planters often host a variety of species. The Hort is concerned largely with the plants’ ability to thrive in the city’s many microclimates while still providing some insect and wildlife habitat. Areas of New York City that have tall buildings and little tree cover are often a few degrees hotter than the larger green spaces in the city. 

The Hort cares for more than 1,000 planters across the city—some of which have been fitted with bee “hotels” and “bunkers” to serve the native bee population. Bee hotels are small birdhouse-like structures peppered with small holes, a home for cavity-nesting bees who usually lay their eggs in dead plant stems. Bunkers are small pots of soil to attract ground-nesting bees, which lay their eggs in burrows in the ground.

The Hort is experimenting with structures that are handmade from plant material and some that are commercially manufactured to gauge which ones work best. 

“The [bee] species that occur in cities tend to be weighted a little bit more towards the cavity-nesting groups, which are the rarer type in the suburban and rural areas,” said Kimberly Russell, an associate professor at the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources at Rutgers University who is working with the Hort to support the city’s bee population. She said these cavity-nesting bees can often make do with human-altered structures. 

“Plants in our city are, as far as we’re concerned, as essential as transportation or schools or any of the other things that help keep our city so vital.”

— Sara Hobel, the Horticultural Society of New York

Some planters also have a bunker containing a type of soil that Russell is testing to see if it will attract ground-nesting bees. It’s harder for these bees to survive in the city because so much of the landscape is paved over. In gardens, Russell says that people should leave some bare ground, free of mulch, to encourage bees to nest. 

“There’s a lot of ways in which they reflect some of the challenges of living in our city,” said Hobel. “They are solitary nesters, they live by themselves, they have to hunt out and find a little home that is safe to lay their eggs in.”

Russell worries that, despite their efforts, climate change and human actions could continue to accelerate the decline of the bee populations. But she and Hobel hope that providing the native bees with some places to nest will help them survive better in the city.