On the rooftops above the office canyons of Midtown Manhattan, there is a corporate life for bees where new colonies pollinate green roofs and produce honey for the lucky tenants working below.

At One Bryant Park last summer, Richard Kohlbrecher, who is allergic to bee venom, first saw hundreds of honeybees darting in and out of the sprawling sedum ground cover on the green roofs he was inspecting. He turned his initial alarm into a housing plan for the secret tenants.

“I had never seen that before and it got me thinking: if there are that many bees in Midtown, maybe it makes sense to put up some hives,” said Mr. Kohlbrecher, vice president for operations for The Durst Organization, which owns the company’s 51-story-tower at 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. The skyscraper houses the corporate and investment businesses of the Bank of America as well as Durst’s offices.

And so, unbeknown to the busy office workers and the tourists sunning themselves in Bryant Park, above them on the seventh-floor rooftop are now some 100,000 European honeybees brought in with two main hives earlier this summer.