Bees in the City
Being among bees is a full-body experience, Mark Winston writes — from the low hum of tens of thousands of insects and the pungent smell of honey and beeswax, to the sight of workers flying back and forth between flowers and the hive. The experience of an apiary slows our sense of time, heightens our awareness, and inspires awe. Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive presents Winston’s reflections on three decades spent studying these creatures, and on the lessons they can teach about how humans might better interact with one another and the natural world. Here is a brief excerpt from the book looking at bees in the city of Vancouver.
It’s a small zone of urban tranquility, a rooftop garden twenty-one hundred square feet in size and located on a third-floor hotel terrace. It was one of Vancouver’s first green roofs, now growing sixty varieties of herbs, vegetables, fruits, and edible blossoms, pollinated by a few beehives tucked away in a garden corner.
Not just a random isolated roof, this represents a significant trend in the hospitality industry. Gardens and the bees that pollinate them are found on many of the most exclusive hotel roofs in the world.
Vancouver’s first hotel eco-rooftop is about twenty years old, although the bees are more recent. It’s in the absolute heart of urban downtown, at the Fairmont Waterfront, overlooking the harbor on one side and tall skyscrapers in other directions. Similar rooftop beekeeping can be found at Fairmont hotels across Canada as well as in San Francisco; Washington, DC; Newport Beach; Dallas; Seattle; and Boston. Many other four- and five-star properties are doing the same, including New York’s historic Waldorf-Astoria hotel, Paris’s Eiffel Tower Hotel, and London’s Royal Lancaster.
The Fairmont widely promotes bees as part of its eco-hotel brand. The bees on their roof produce more than six hundred pounds of honey a year, and the hotel maintains an additional nineteen colonies near the Vancouver airport that bring in another forty-two hundred pounds. Each of their rooftop apple trees went from twenty to two hundred apples when honey-bees were added to the garden, providing enough yield to keep the restaurant supplied in ingredients that are as local as it gets.
The Fairmont’s executive chef, Dana Hauser, views honey as fitting into both the hotel’s signature cuisine and its commitment to local ingredients and ecology. She’s originally from Upper Island Cove, Newfoundland, and still talks with a lilting accent from back home. She said, “I like to really support our local community; we’re focused on the one-hundred-mile lifestyle, using food from nearby as much as possible. The Fairmont Waterfront is committed to being a green hotel . . [Bees are] our way of encouraging the pollination of flowers in our area.”
Her signature honey dishes include organic Fraser Valley mesclun greens with rooftop honey lavender vinaigrette, rooftop honey-roasted breast of duck, and warm apple pie with honey goat cheese ice cream.
The hotel offers complimentary tours of the garden, including the unique experience of tasting honey right from the hive. As Hauser described it: “You’ve never tasted honey until you’ve tasted honey that comes directly from a frame. You pull the frames out, they’re dripping everywhere. It’s a sensory experience. They spoon the honey up from the frames and can taste the just-made fresh honey, still warm, and chew the wax — they love it. And I love that last lick of the spoon. That’s the kind of stuff you come to work for every day.”
The Fairmont was Vancouver’s first hotel rooftop location for beehives, but there were earlier sites motivated less by the green movement and more by using rooftops to hide colonies from city authorities enforcing bylaws prohibiting beekeeping. There’s a famous story in Vancouver of a crusty old-time beekeeper who, decades ago, kept twenty colonies on the roof of a building in Chinatown, painting them black for camouflage. He bragged about his incredible yields of four hundred pounds per hive until someone pointed out that his bees were only half a mile from a large sugar-processing plant. The “flowers” they were foraging on were piles of white sugar waiting to be loaded onto ships in the harbor.
The surreptitious nature of Vancouver beekeeping shifted in 2005, when the city changed its bylaws to allow beekeeping. Colonies and their keepers came out of hiding. One in particular, Allen Garr, emerged unofficially as the senior figure passing on lore, training new beekeepers, and managing the more high-profile colonies in public gardens, at Science World, and on the Convention Centre’s green roof.
Garr is in his early seventies but looks at least ten years younger. He’s a journalist by trade, working at times for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s national television news and at others as a writer for local Vancouver newspapers. He’s thin, fit, wears a simple gold earring in his left ear, and has the sweetest of dispositions. And he’s passionate about raising bees in the city.
I talked with him at length in his 1920s-built Vancouver home. It sits in an older neighborhood lined with leafy trees and filled with character homes from that era. Garr’s house has a large, welcoming porch, the original fir floors, stained-glass windows, sliding hardwood pocket doors, and that quirky, patched-together architecture that results from numerous additions and renovations.
We met in his basement honey house, where chats with beekeepers anywhere in the world usually start. Urban honey houses tend to be small and efficient; Garr’s is in a corner converted for extracting honey and building and storing equipment. It has that signature beekeeping smell of wax and honey and is decorated in beekeeper funk with used overalls, boxes, lids, and veils stacked all around the room. When I arrived, he was washing out his honey-extracting equipment in the basement sink, marking the end of this year’s fall extracting season.
I asked him how he got his start in bees, and it turns out he was reluctant: “A friend of mine was a beekeeper. He asked me if I was interested in keeping bees, I said I wasn’t, then he asked me again and I said I wasn’t, and then he picked up a swarm on the west side of town, dropped it off on my back deck, and said, ‘You’re a beekeeper.’ ”
Beekeeping was still illegal when he started, around 1974, and it appealed to his rebellious side: “I’m an old hippie. Keeping bees in the city illegally was kind of cool, like having a grow-op.”
There’s an urban legend about Garr that I had heard many times but doubted: that he was allergic to bee stings. It turns out to be true. He spent seven years getting desensitizing shots, which reduced the danger to some extent, although he still winds up in the emergency room on occasion after a particularly effective sting.
I asked him why he would maintain a potentially life- threatening hobby, and like most beekeepers he has multiple reasons behind his passion: “I like animals. When I was a kid, I had tropical fish and pigeons I’d breed and show at the Canadian National Exhibition. Bees are just really fascinating, the way they work as a collective. I also like the impact they have on the environment. It’s plugged me into the world, a prism through which I learned to be an environmentalist.”
Urban beekeeping has increased exponentially in recent years in spite of colony collapse disorder and the myriad pests and diseases facing contemporary beekeepers. Where ten or so older men used to show up at a typical Vancouver bee club meeting, average attendance is now more than 110 and includes many women and younger members.
And it’s not only Vancouver. In Toronto, sales of beekeeping equipment hit a record high this year, and registrations for a community-run introductory beekeeping course have jumped from a handful of participants each year to more than one hundred. In London, England, hive numbers jumped from sixteen hundred to thirty-three hundred in the last four years.
France has become another center of urban beekeeping, with the French government encouraging honeybees in cities throughout the country. Paris is particularly honeybee friendly, with rooftop hives popping up on luxury hotels and skyscrapers and in the renowned Luxembourg Gardens. And honey from city bees has become fashionable, with the finest restaurants rolling out signature honey-based cuisine.
Perhaps the most famous urban beehives are atop the Paris Opera house, each producing between 110 and 180 pounds of honey annually. Beekeeper Jean Paucton points to the ban of pesticides in Paris and a wide variety of flowers as factors contributing to consistently higher honey yields in the city than from hives kept in the surrounding countryside. An analysis of pollen in Parisian honey showed more than 250 different floral sources compared to around fifteen to twenty in country-produced honey, supporting Paucton’s belief in the richness of Parisian habitats.
Garr attributes some of the growth in Vancouver to bee-keeping going legal: “The bylaw made a big difference — not everyone wants to do things that are illegal.” Beekeeping as an urban hobby also has the advantage of requiring only a small space, even just a balcony or tiny backyard.
He also noted some deeper reasons behind beekeeping’s current urban popularity that place bees as an essential element of an increasing sense among urbanites of connecting to the environment: “People are freaked out about the environment and global warming and want to do something. They’re worried, trying to have a healthier world. It’s the same people who used to go back to the land in my generation. They’re staying in the city and buying a place where they can tear up a lawn and put in a garden and beehives. The same people who are involved with urban agriculture are into beekeeping.”
Besides their environmental and agricultural mindsets, urban beekeepers possess a streak of oddball; it’s an edgier hobby than, say, knitting scarves or growing zucchini. It also attracts the exceptionally curious, those eager to learn and share information. New beekeepers quickly become rabid attendees of bee club events, talks, workshops, and field days.
What’s more, urban beekeeping is not only for prosperous middle-class residents. Bees are also being used in tougher settings to provide livelihood and deliver social services to city residents who have addictions, mental illness, or disabilities or are homeless or poverty stricken.
