Her words stung.
A Brooklyn woman in search of pollen told famed NYC beekeeper Andrew Coté to buzz off after he closed his Union Square Greenmarket stand an hour early Wednesday in the middle of a ferocious storm.
The disgruntled customer complained to Coté, who posted her scathing letter on his Instagram page.
She griped that she arrived at the market, which closes at 6 p.m., at 5 — and the shop owner was already packed up and refused to serve her.
“A little wind and rain should not drive a real farmer away from the market so early,” wrote the women, who identified herself only as Rachel H. from Brooklyn and provided a phony email address.
“I will be buying my pollen on Amazon from now on. I will report you to the market management for refusing me service. I hope you get stings.”
“I tried very hard to placate her, but even standing talking to her, I was getting pelted with rain that was hitting my face at 40 miles an hour,” Coté, 52, whose stand is called Andrew’s Honey, told The Post.
“There was nothing left set up, everything was inside my truck. There was really nothing I could do for her.”
Management at the market, which is run by the nonprofit GrowNYC, allowed farmers to leave at 1p.m. on Wednesday due to the inclement weather, explained Coté, but he decided to stay longer to satisfy his customers.
Coté, who lives on the Upper West Side and maintains close to 100 beehives and millions of bees in Manhattan alone, also provided her with multiple options to obtain the pollen.
“That we’d be back on Saturday, that she could order it online, and that, if she wanted to, I could meet her the next morning on the Upper West Side because I would be doing alternate side parking.”
He shared the letter on his Instagram page @andrewshoney, with a caption that stated the customer was “forgetting we were in the middle of a storm so bad that half the farmers didn’t even show up and 90% had already left. Winds were so bad that tents blew over and were destroyed and one farmer received a concussion from a wayward wind-blown tent.”
The fourth-generation beekeeper, who is also one of the experts the NYPD contacts when a swarm has to be dismantled, said he decided to post the note on social media “out of frustration.”
Coté’s followers supported him, writing comments like “Rachel is not a kind person,” “I’d be happy to lose her as a customer” and “watch a swarm show up outside her apartment.”
Another added, “looks like Rachel is the one getting stung in these comments.”
“I knew that the community would rally and give me a little bit of support because frankly I was disheartened that we stood out in that terrible weather all day and then at the very end of it, harm was wished on me in the form of stings and a threat to go to the management,” Coté said.
“My wife said, ‘That’s what you get for trying to help people. No good deed goes unpunished.'”
