According to Bloomberg, honeybees, under threat in rural and agricultural areas, are finding an unlikely refuge: the big city.
For $500 to $3,000 a year per hive, beekeeping operations offer to install honeybee colonies on urban rooftops. The price includes regular checks on the bees’ health, perks like classes in biodiversity and beekeeping and, usually, samples of ultra-local honey.
Apiterra, an urban beekeeping company, operates 300 hives across Paris, with clients including L’Oréal, AXA and the Paris Saint-Germain football club.
Apiterra’s main competitor in Paris is Beeopic, which operates 350 hives, including at the Grand Palais exhibition hall, the headquarters of BNP Paribas SA, Europe’s biggest bank, luxury goods giant LVMH, and even some that survived the fire atop the Notre Dame Cathedral. There are currently 2,500 hives registered in Paris, up from 300 in 2010.
Beeopic was acquired last year by the giant in the urban beekeeping world, Montréal-based Alvéole, which operates 3,100 beehives for 600 companies in 20 North American cities. Backed by Edō Capital, a venture-capital fund, Alvéole charges an average of $2,000 a year per hive, offering its corporate clients a package including candle-making courses and branded souvenir honey.
Dale Gibson, an apicultural consultant in Greater London, says his city has reached an unsustainable density of beehives — more than doubling in the last decade to 7,500, according to the UK’s National Bee Unit. Gibson says installing beehives as an image-booster without studying the impact on local plants and pollinators is a form of greenwashing.
“Getting a ‘beewash’ effect is easy,” he said. “You just plunk a beehive on your roof and say, ‘That’s a great job I’ve done for biodiversity’.”
“Corporates have taken the urban beekeeping fad and turned it into an ecological disaster because they’ve gone ahead without considering forage scarcity,” he said.
Of the 100 crop species that provide 90 per cent of food worldwide, 71 are pollinated by bees, according to a study by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. In many places, bees have been imperilled when most of a colony’s worker bees disappear.
Over the last 15 years US beekeepers have lost 28.3 per cent of their colonies on average each winter, according to the Bee Informed Partnership, a nonprofit affiliated with the US Department of Agriculture. That’s more than double the country’s 10 to 15 per cent historical loss rates.
