Employees at Fort York are on alert after two of their beehives were sliced open, leaving the bees to die in the cold in what appears to be a third recent act of vandalism.

“At some point over the last couple of weeks, someone’s been down there messing around with the hives,” David O’Hara, manager of the Fort York National Historic Site, told the Star on Saturday.

“(Someone) took some of the honey and the honeycombs, and unfortunately they left the bees in a pretty vulnerable situation in the cold weather.”

O’Hara said Toronto Honeys, a beekeeping duo who tend the fort’s apiary, told him about the damage on Friday, but that this wasn’t the first instance.

“The beehives have been disturbed at least two times before since mid-December,” O’Hara said. Beekeepers noticed damage to the hives on Dec. 20 and again last Thursday.

A Toronto police spokesperson, Const. Allyson Douglas-Cook, said police had been notified and are looking into the incident.

“We’re heartbroken to have found that two of the hives in our apiary have been vandalized,” read a post on the fort’s Facebook page from Friday.

More than 50,000 bees live in and around Fort York, in hives built by Shawn Caza, one of the two beekeepers behind Toronto Honeys.

Some of the fort’s beehives sit in the community garden outside the north walls, near a steep wooded drop to railway tracks used by the Lakeshore West GO line. The fort also has a number of “bee hotels,” for native wild bees in need of a home — dubbed “Bee Barracks.”

Animals hungry for honey live in and around the Fort, but photos of damage to the hive suggest a raccoon was not to blame.

“We wish that were the case, but unfortunately the hives were closed up very well and the cuts were very clean,” Fort York wrote in reply to a comment on the Facebook page. “It was obviously done with a knife and some know-how.”

O’Hara said the hives aren’t easy to open, and that anyone seeking to damage them would have needed a lot of time.

Toronto is home to more than 300 types of bees and is one of Canada’s richest areas for “pollinator” species of insects. Last year, city council passed a motion to designate Toronto as Canada’s first Bee City, joining a program aimed at promoting and protecting insects in urban areas.

The city is home to several programs to support pollinators, including the Evergreen Brick Works, the Humber Bay Butterfly Habitat and the Black Creek community farm. Some downtown buildings, including the Royal York Hotel, also have apiaries.

Four of the fort’s other beehives were not damaged.

Break-ins at Fort York are not unusual during the summer months, especially along the north wall, but vandalism is typically not an issue.

Despite the troubling situation, O’Hara said the response from the public has been very helpful.

Eric Plaxton, a commenter on the fort’s Facebook page, offered his services as a carpenter and welder. “It’s the least I can do for the bees, which have done so much for us!” he wrote.

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Toronto Honeys helped clean up the damage on Friday and tried on Saturday to save bees from the two hives.

“It’s been a sad time folks,” Toronto Honeys wrote on their Twitter page. “Looking forward to brighter times.”