In general, cities and agriculture — of any kind, really — do not mix. You won’t find many, if any, orange groves in Manhattan. There are few (but there are, actually, a few) chicken coops in Brooklyn. And cows in Queens? Not happening. The last working Manhattan farm closed in the 1930s.

But there are always exceptions, and beekeeping is one of them. There is a group of New York City beekeepers with over 1,700 members on Facebook.In March 2010, the city lifted a ban on raising honeybees, and per the New York Times, by June of 2012, roughly 100 people had registered nearly 200 hives with the New York City Department of Mental Health and Hygiene. And many other unregistered ones exist; in August of 2012, the cityis caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi and is endemic to Latin America. A large proportion of immigrants from Latin America to the United States are from areas where the prevalence of the pathogenic agent T. cruzi is high. It is estimated that at least 50,000 people infected with T. cruzi have emigrated to the U.S.A. In addition to insect vectors, another route of infection is transfusion and this is an emerging problem in the United States. Often the infection caused by T. cruzi is chronic and the majority of carriers initially display only mild symptoms. The infectious form of the parasite, trypomastigotes, circulate in the infected individual's blood and is capable of surviving the blood banking process and storage. No serological test for T. cruzi in blood