LIKE a scene out of a late-night horror film, the wriggling swarms of bees appear around the city like clockwork every year in football-size globs.
They are a hideous sight -- tens of thousands of bees stuck to trees, light poles, traffic signals and, to the dismay of unsuspecting residents, parked cars.
Passers-by scramble for cover. Children gawk at the unusual sight. The police are powerless against the buzzing masses.
But often, just as things begin to look grim, in steps an unassuming former copy machine repairman named Wally Blohm.
He dons a set of white coveralls (no gloves or mask for Mr. Blohm), sprays a little smoke on the swarm and then carefully goes about his business of collecting the bees with a special machine so he can let them out later at his hives in Queens.
"You just turn the vacuum cleaner on," he said, describing a method that usually makes onlookers cringe. "It's pretty simple."
In a city where urban skills like cab hailing can be highly prized, Mr. Blohm is one of the few who have endeavored to master the rural craft of beekeeping. He, and a handful of other aficionados, are the unofficial beekeepers of New York City.
Each spring and early summer, Mr. Blohm (pronounced Blome) and his cohorts are dispatched around the city by the police or fire departments to remove the buzzing clumps of bees that take up temporary residence as they search for a permanent hives.
The amateur beekeepers charge the city nothing for their services, but they get to keep the bees, which is what they are really after. For private homeowners, Mr. Blohm charges from $35 and up to remove bees.
From just a single hive 20 years ago, Mr. Blohm has built up a collection of 35, mainly from calls from the city. For his trouble he harvests about 1,000 pounds of New York City honey, which he swears is some of the best in the state. He also makes about 100 beeswax candles every year.
"It's a wonderful hobby," Mr. Blohm said. "People always look at me and say, 'What are you doing?' "
Professionally, Mr. Blohm, a graying 54-year-old who lives in Jamaica, Queens, owns a pest extermination company. Sometimes he is forced to kill the bees with pesticide when there is no practical way to vacuum them.
Mr. Blohm grew up in the East 60's, the son of a restaurant manager. In his youth, he didn't pay much attention to bees. It wasn't until he was in his 30's that he saw his first hive. "I mean, all I saw in the city were cockroaches," he said.
His brother had been introduced to beekeeping by a friend whose father kept hives in Hicksville, L.I. One day, Mr. Blohm's brother asked him to take some pictures of him working around the hives, and later he gave him a book to read on beekeeping. Mr. Blohm has been hooked ever since.
"I couldn't put that book down," he said. "It just fascinated me learning about how they lived." His brother helped him learn the craft and told him that the easiest way to get started with beekeeping was to make himself available to the police to pick up bee swarms in the summer.
The first year, Mr. Blohm got only one swarm, in Queens. But slowly, he built up his contacts and now has what he believes is the largest apiary in the city, in an orchard off Little Neck Parkway at the Queens County Farm Museum in Floral Park.
In his 20 years as a beekeeper, Mr. Blohm has vacuumed bees from the American Museum of Natural History, parking meters, garbage cans, a newspaper stand and even the back of a truck. "The guy went into his office and when he came back out, he had a swarm," he said.
Bee swarms are a normal occurrence that take place when hives become too crowded. In New York City, bees do most of their swarming at the height of honey production in May and June, when the size of the hive is increasing the fastest. This season, his busiest, Mr. Blohm has answered at least 20 calls.
Honeybees in the city are most commonly found in the empty areas between wall supports, Mr. Blohm said. They usually enter buildings through exterior cracks.
The city's honeybees are almost exclusively of the Caucasian and Italian varieties of the species Apis mellifera that were brought to North America by settlers in the 1600's. No honeybees are indigenous to this area, said Roger A. Morse, professor of beekeeping at Cornell University and the author of the book that inspired Mr. Blohm. There are hundreds of bee species in New York City, Professor Morse said, but only honeybees swarm.
Swarming bees, Mr. Blohm said, pose no danger to anyone unless disturbed -- always a possibility in the city. Even if a swarm attacks, Professor Morse said, the danger of death is minimal, unless the person is allergic to bees.
Police Officer Michael Kubenik, another of the city's unofficial beekeepers, said he was once coming down a ladder with a basketball-size swarm stuck to a tree branch when he inadvertently shook the clump and dumped half the bees all over his body.
"I had all these people looking up at me and they started screaming like they thought I was going to get stung to death," he said.
Officer Kubenik, the crime prevention officer for the 52d Precinct in the Bronx, said he was wearing a protective helmet and gloves at the time and was unafraid. "I just brushed them off," he said.
Mr. Blohm said he had never been attacked by a swarm; he usually wears no protection, relying most often on just a little puff of smoke from a smoke pot to quiet the bees. He is stung regularly, so many times now that it no longer bothers him. "I stopped counting after a thousand," he said. "Now, it only bothers me when I get stung in certain areas, like my fingers."
Having sucked up the bees with his special vacuum cleaner, Mr. Blohm transplants the swarm into wooden hives, and there's little else for him to do except monitor them for diseases. In August, he begins harvesting the honey the bees have stored up for the winter, about 60 pounds per hive.
Honey varies with the type of trees and flowers in the area. New York City honey, he said, has a distinctive flavor of its own. "It's not overly sweet, has a nice amber color and is not bitter. It's a real nice mix."
Mr. Blohm's honey sales provide enough income to just about cover the cost of his hobby.
"This is what I plan to do in my retirement," Mr. Blohm said. "I can just sit next to the hives and watch them go in and out for hours. And you don't need anyone to baby-sit them. If I want to go, I just go." Hive Hunting: The Swarm Story
Honeybee colonies divide and grow by swarming.
When the hive becomes too crowded, the queen bee begins laying eggs that produce only queen bees. Once done, she leaves the hive, taking a swarm of several thousand along, usually in the morning or early afternoon.
The football-sized cluster takes up residence for several hours or sometimes days in a tree or on a branch as scouts search for a new home.
Meanwhile, back at the hive, when the first new queen emerges from a honeycomb cell, she kills the others before they hatch so she will be the only queen in the hive.
Once a suitable site is found, the swarm following the old queen takes off and begins constructing its new hive.
The bees left in the old hive continue to work for the new queen.
Photo: A swarm of bees was spotted on East 33d Street, and Wally Blohm, one of the city's unofficial beekeepers, sprung into action. (Philip Greenberg for The New York Times)