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.

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.