If you’re looking for someone to thank for the Knicks’ recent championship win, Andrew Coté has a suggestion: the honeybees he keeps on the roof of Madison Square Garden. “And not only the bees, but the fans should be thankful to the beekeeper,” he says cheekily. “Clearly, there’s a direct correlation between Andrew’s Honey placing bees at the top of MSG and the recent success of the Knicks.”
He’s kidding… mostly. But the timing is delightfully serendipitous, coinciding with the long-awaited end of the Knicks’ 53-year championship drought. While nearly 20,000 fans packed MSG in June, another crowd quietly hummed overhead. Six honeybee colonies—installed in April and reaching roughly 390,000 bees by early summer —spent the season building comb, gathering nectar, and, if you ask Coté, helping bring home the victory.
Home Court Advantage
Coté, a fourth-generation beekeeper and founder of Andrew’s Honey, manages 108 colonies across the five boroughs and the tristate area. He’s best known for his rooftop hives atop landmark buildings like the Waldorf Astoria, the New York Hilton Midtown, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, and the grounds of the United Nations.
This spring, he became the newest steward of the Garden’s five-year-old pollinator initiative, previously run by The Best Bees Company. MSG first embraced rooftop beekeeping as part of its sustainability efforts in 2021, emphasizing the importance of pollinators in a healthy ecosystem. “A third of the world’s food production depends on bees, and MSG is doing its part to increase the bee population to keep our people and the planet healthy,” the institution said in its 2024 Corporate Social Responsibility Report. Coté’s arrival marks a new chapter in that ongoing commitment.
Maintaining a rooftop hive in the heart of Midtown is less glamorous than you might imagine. Coté, who lives on the Upper West Side, sweats and swears through hours of Manhattan traffic in his blue Ford F-350, circling for parking, before hauling smokers, hive tools, and heavy equipment up Eighth Avenue and passing through airport-style security at MSG. Once inside, an elevator carries him to the roof, where Hudson Yards rises in the distance, and the commotion surrounding the world-famous arena drops away. “It’s strange to be in a big place like that with it so empty,” Coté says. Then he lifts the lid.
“When I approach MSG and walk through the halls and see the memorabilia, I am filled with wonder and excitement about the institution,” he says. “But once I crack the lid of that beehive, I am completely engrossed in the organized chaos that is an active, healthy colony.”
The Honey Hustle
That feeling has kept Coté coming back to bees since childhood. His family has kept hives since the late 1800s, first on a dairy farm in Quebec and later in the U.S. He learned to keep bees at age nine from his father, Norm, a Connecticut firefighter, not because he was fascinated by honey, but for the simple reason of wanting to spend time with his dad. “He smelled like smoke from his firehouse job and his beekeeping,” Coté remembers. “It was a nice way for me to get to know him.”
After serving as a Fulbright professor in Eastern Europe and later as a tenured professor in Connecticut teaching language and literature, Coté left academia to join his father in the family bee business in 2006.
“The lure of the bees and spending time with my father was stronger, and I never regretted it,” Coté says. “Working with honey over the years has been meditative for me. I feel a connection to nature and the generations of my family who kept bees, stretching back over a century.”
The name on the honey jar has changed over the four generations of beekeepers—from Hector to Aldea to Norm to Andrew—but the family tradition has endured. Coté’s father, now 83, still occasionally joins him on rooftop hive visits, as does his 10-year-old, Nobu, though he doesn’t believe he’ll be the next generation in the family line of beekeepers. “Perhaps he’ll come back to it, but I don’t have an ego about it,” Coté says. Did you know? Apis laboriosa, the Himalayan giant honey bee, is one of the world’s largest honey bees and is found in the mountains of Nepal. It produces the distinctive honey known as mad honey, which can be highly potent due to naturally occurring grayanotoxins from rhododendron nectar.
Family Business, Elevated
While beekeeping has been in the family for generations, Coté pioneered the move onto New York City’s rooftops. He founded the New York City Beekeepers Association and helped write the regulations that legalized beekeeping in the city in 2010, laying the groundwork for the rooftop apiaries that have since become part of the city’s urban landscape. (He also the author of the memoir Honey and Venom: Confessions of a Beekeeper.)
Now, each of his hives produces up to 120 pounds of honey annually. The company sells the raw honey at the Union Square Greenmarket, online, and at its Upper West Side brick-and-mortar at 315 Columbus Avenue, open Tuesday through Sunday.
Each jar reflects its neighborhood—from Central Park and Nolita to Canarsie, Jackson Heights, and Fordham, the honey is shaped by the trees and flowers within each hive’s three-mile flight radius. Bees don’t distinguish between Midtown offices and Prospect Park; they’ll chase nectar wherever they can find it. Linden trees, a favorite of the city’s Neighborhood Tree Planting Program, lend a light, minty quality to early honey, while Japanese knotweed contributes darker, more herbal notes later in the season.
That local character is part of what makes the city unexpectedly suited for beekeeping. “There’s very little to no pesticide spraying,” Coté says. “And there’s such a unique collection of nectar available,” he says, pointing to the large population of non-native plants.
Above the Noise
Despite decades of working above the city, Coté still finds something enchanting about tending bees atop the Garden, calling it “quite a wonderful feather in the proverbial cap.”
“Having been atop many iconic buildings and historic locations around NYC, there is still something awe-inspiring about MSG,” Coté says. “It’s incredible to consider the history that has unfolded beneath my feet, from Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to President Kennedy and Billy Joel’s record-breaking performances to legendary sporting events. To be in that space while my small, delicate, yet powerful bees fly through the air and perform their special alchemy, turning nectar into honey—there is something magical about having this privilege and responsibility.”
If you want to meet Coté and some of his hives, Domino Park hosts a meet the beekeeper event the first Sunday of the month, June through August, 11am-1pm.
