Category — Bees

A beekeeper pulls a section of honeycomb from a hive. Photograph by Gianluca Colla, National Geographic.

Billions of dollars — and a way of life—ride on saving pollinators

Jennifer S. Holland
National Geographic News
Published May 10, 2013

Excerpts:

Bees are back in the news this spring, if not back in fields pollinating this summer’s crops. The European Union (EU) has announced that it will ban, for two years, the use of neonicotinoids, the much-maligned pesticide group often fingered in honeybee declines. The U.S. hasn’t followed suit, though this year a group of beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups sued the EPA for not doing enough to protect bees from the pesticide onslaught.

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Jana Kinsman transports her beekeeping equipment on Bullitt cargo bikes. Photo by Jana Kinsman.

Chicago beekeeper wants to provide the community with a visual example of bees, because so many people grow up being afraid of them.

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo
April 25, 2013

Excerpt:

Last year was rough for Jana Kinsman’s bees.

Kinsman, 27, set up 10 beehives in community gardens and other spaces across the city last summer, the first step in her fledgling urban farming project dubbed Bike a Bee.

She traveled to the hives by bicycle. Residents welcomed their new neighbors.

That was the easy part.

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Beekeepers and employees install three beehives in the blue, white, red colours of the French national flag on the roof of the National Assembly in Paris. Photo by Jacky Naegelen.

The roof of France’s National Assembly is ready to buzz with activity after the arrival of three large bee hives this week as part of a project to promote pesticide-free honey

By Tara Oakes
Reuters
PARIS. Apr 4, 2013

Excerpt:

The bees are expected to be moved in once the weather warms up, should produce up to 150 kg of honey a year and help pollinate flowering plants around the capital at a time of worldwide decline in bee numbers.

The project is part of a new trend across Europe to put bee colonies on city rooftops, taking advantage of the fact that bees adapt well to urban living and can target the many varieties of long-blooming inner-city greenery.

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Sarah Common, left, and her mother, Julia Common, right, with the help of Jim McLeod in the middle, check on the beehive at the community garden on Vancouver’s East Hastings on March 28, 2013. Photograph by: Ward Perrin, Vancouver Sun.

This hive of activity offers beekeepers a touch of therapeutic renewal

By Jeff Lee
Vancouver Sun
March 31, 2013

Excerpt:

On a vacant lot next door to the Insite supervised drug injection facility in Vancouver’s gritty Downtown Eastside, a busy little beehive is teaching people about hope and redemption and erasing long-held misconceptions.

For Jim McLeod, at 36 still battling issues with drug addiction, caring for the hive of honey-producing bees has taught him patience and how to look beyond the day-to-day stresses of trying to survive in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood.

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A Guide to Natural Beekeeping in Top Bar Hives

By Christy Hemenway
New Society Publishers
January 2013

What’s the buzz about the growing popularity of backyard beekeeping? Providing habitat for bees, pollinating your garden and producing honey for your family are some of the compelling reasons for taking up this exciting hobby. But conventional beekeeping requires a significant investment and has a steep learning curve. The alternative? Consider beekeeping outside the box.

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O’Hare’s Urban Garden. Photo by reallowvibe.

The airport has also been home to a handful of honeybees being tended to by urban beekeepers

By Rick Paulas
KCET
March 21, 2013

Excerpt:

The 928-square-foot garden, first opened last September, consists of 26 aeroponic towers that grow a variety of herbs and vegetables. The list of produce growing in the towers includes, but is not limited to, chard, basil, lettuce, edible flowers, bell peppers, and tomatoes. And just who is using these vegetables? Currently, three restaurants in the airport proper make regular treks to the garden to harvest produce for their dishes: Wolfgang Puck, Rick Bayless’s Tortas Fontera Grill, and the highly-acclaimed Wicker Park Sushi Bar.

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Photo by Brooklyn Grange.

Twenty-five hives each containing around 40,000 bees were torn apart Monday night.

By Susie Cagle
Grist
Oct 30, 2012

Excerpt:

Casualties of Hurricane Sandy included 1 million unfortunate bees at the Brooklyn Grange’s Navy Yard urban farming project. Twenty-five hives each containing around 40,000 bees were torn apart Monday night.

“All our hives that were out on the pier were destroyed,” said Chase Emmons, a managing partner and the chief beekeeper at Brooklyn Grange.

An additional 10 hives located on Brooklyn Grange’s rooftop farm survived — but the loss is catastrophic for the city’s largest apiary. Emmons knew before the storm that the hives were at risk.

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Painted panels at a bee house in Cerknika, Slovenia. Photo by Meredith Turk.

Every Slovenian knows at least one beekeeper, but likely closer to ten. (Soiled and Seeded)

By Meredith Turk
Soiled and Seeded
Issue 8, Sept. 2012

Excerpt:

The Slovenian landscape would not be the same without the thousands of bee houses that pepper roadsides and small mountain villages. Slovenians have painted their beehive panels for centuries, with the idea that bees have better orientation when panels are painted bright colors. When the paintings first appeared, the themes were drawn from Biblical imagery, held in high regard by a strongly Catholic population. After Slovenia’s entry into Yugoslavia, organized religion was banned and panel images depicted more cultural and landscape scenes rather than religious ones prior.

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Cops discovered an incredible 3 million bees being kept as “pets” at a house yesterday. Photo by Andrew Cote/Nyc Beekeepers Association.

‘It’s gotten out of hand,’ admits Yin Gin Chen. Beekeepers swarm upon Corona house and confiscate insects and take them to undisclosed location

By Clare Trapasso And Oren Yaniv
New York Daily News
Aug 23, 2012

Excerpt:

A residential Queens block became a buzzy battleground with nearly 3 million bees swarming around a modest brick house on a lot teeming with 45 hives.

Brazen beekeeper Yi Gin Chen, 58, claimed he started with one hive two years ago and the insects just multiplied.
“It’s gotten out of hand,” he said. “I don’t have the time or resources to do this.”

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Kristin Wazbinski and Pollinator program project leader Sheila Colla of Wildlife Preservation Canada catch bees near Webster’s Falls in Greensville, Ont. Photograph by: Glenn Lowson.

The rusty-patched bumble bee, known to scientists as Bombus affinis, is the first bee in North America to be officially declared an endangered species.

By Margaret Munro
Postmedia News
August 19, 2012

Excerpt:

Packer and his graduate students focus on wild bees – about 19,500 species in the world, 808 of them in Canada. They say the insects deserve more attention and appreciation, in part because they are such sensitive environmental indicators. “They’re like the canary in the coal mine,” says Packer.

And when a common species such as the rusty-patched bumble bee disappears, he says, “it’s a warning signal that things are going wrong in the great outdoors.”

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An urban beekeeper in London. Photograph by Dan Kitwood.

The Bee Collective will extract and jar honey from beekeepers across London, aiming to promote habitats in the city

The Guardian
Aug 17, 2012

Excerpt:

Beekeeping in London has reached unprecedented levels in the past five years. Beekeepers’ associations report membership more than doubling and it is thought there could be as many as 5,000 beekeepers within the M25, each with an average of three hives. But harvesting and extracting honey from the honey comb can be a laborious, sticky and expensive process. The Bee Collective says it aims to take the effort out of extraction. In return it wants a small amount of honey as payment.

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Until 2010, beekeeping was illegal in New York City

By Charley Cameron,
Inhabitat New York City
06/30/12

Excerpts:

The 20th floor of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria now accommodates some rather unusual residents — around 250,000 bees living on the roof of the prestigious hotel. Transported to their new midtown Manhattan digs by a Lincoln Towncar, the pollinating inhabitants of the six beehives were placed there to support the PlaNYC initiative to plant 1,000,000 new trees over the next decade. The hotel will benefit directly too, with their own in-house supply of sustainable honey!

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In Wan Chai, Hong Kong, Michael Lueung keeps a hive of Chinese bees on the roof top of the Art galery and library ACO.

Eric Tourneret’s Megacity Honey – 21st Century Urban Beekeeping – 36 Photos

Eric Tourneret: A photojournalist for 25 years, his favorite work involves studies of subcultures and human interest stories.

Excerpt:

The big capitals of the world are showing an amazing enthusiasm for beekeeping. In London, mayor Boris Johnson has launched a campaign to make the capital “bee friendly”… Apiaries and community gardens have been set up, and – in time for the Olympic Games – the city can boast the creation of 2012 parks… In Berlin, the green city, apiaries have been installed since 2011. The city counts 750 beekeepers, and 2,500 hives.

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Subculture Club is a documentary-style show that looks at subcultures around the country in an exploratory and cinematic output.

By Thrash Lab
Jun 20, 2012

In this episode of Subculture Club we meet up with Urban Beekeeping guru Kirk Anderson (aka Kirkobeeo), co-founder of the Backwards Beekeepers. Kirk and other beekeeping activists will explain: What are the tools for urban beekeeping? How to get the honey from the hive to the jar? Where are the bees? What are the laws around urban beekeeping in Los Angeles and major cities?

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Photos by Virgile Simon Bertrand.

In October 2008 a large banyan tree located in Bangalore, India, made the world record for the number of beehives, with 575 in the one tree.

Nowness
June 5, 2012

High above one of the world’s busiest and most congested city streets, urban apiarist Michael Leung runs his crusade for conscious local food, documented in Virgile Simon Bertrand’s inspiring photographs. Leung founded HK Honey as a way of using his background as a product designer to introduce the largely unknown concept of sustainable food to Hong Kong. Initially starting with just a few hives on the roof of his design studio in Ngau Tau Kok, Leung developed both a brand and a responsible community around his lifestyle ideology. “By putting bees in an industrial area we are showing a bit of optimism and that it’s not too late to do something about environmental change,” he explains.

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Gorgeous film about an urban beekeeper in Brooklyn

Directed and Produced By
Keith “Keef” Ehrlich
Director Of Photography
Joshua Kraszewski
Music
Alessandro Cortini
2012

Local farmer Megan Paska has witnessed beekeeping as it morphed from an illegal (and possibly crazy) habit to a sustainable, community-supported skill. Mirroring beekeeping’s own ascendance, she found more than just a living: “This is the first time in my life when I’ve just felt absolutely on the right path.”

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Jana Kinsman models a beekeeper’s veil by her hives at Eden Place nature center. Photo by John Greenfield.

Bike·a·Bee is connecting Chicago greenspaces, community gardens and urban farms with beehives that need a nice sunny spot to live. All of the hives are visited and cared for on a bike!

By John Greenfield
Grid Chicago
Jan 10, 2012

Excerpt:

Chicago cyclist Jana Kinsman has a honey of a plan. As a freelance graphic designer and illustrator, she did design, illustration and modeling for the 2011 and 2012 Thought You Knew pin-up calendars, featuring glamorous photos of local bicyclists. But last summer while apprenticing at an apiary (a place where bees, not apes, are kept) in Oregon, she got bitten by the bug. She decided to start Bike-a-Bee, a car-free beekeeping project back home in the Windy City.

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Video and story from Faircompanies here.

Is the City the Future for Honeybees? America’s Only Urban Beekeeping Store Owner Thinks So

Sami Grover
Treehugger
December 28, 2011

Excerpt:

We’ve already seen studies that suggest that big city bees may be healthier than their rural counterparts. And that’s something Bryon Waibel—proprietor of America’s only urban beekeeping store Her Majesty’s Secret Beekeeper—would agree with. Having seen his own urban bees thrive while his Dad’s bees in the countryside of Minnesota have struggled, Waibel is convinced that the city may be the home of the future for honeybees.

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The Honeytrap cocktail.
35ml Krupnik honey liqueur
25ml The King’s Ginger liqueur
15ml rosewater
15ml lemon juice (about half a lemon’s worth)
25ml honey

Shake with ice and serve with a twist of lemon in a martini glass.

By Ian Douglas
The Telegraph
23 Aug 2011

Excerpt:

Mikey Tomkins keeps the hive on top of the hall and organised the event as part of his work at Sustain, a charity that promotes good practice in food production. ‘We’re a charity, we promote food in huge variety. There’s the sustainable fish for London campaign, the real bread campaign, and Capital Bee [a Sustain campaign sponsored by the Mayor of London's office] is part of Capital Growth, which promotes food growing in London.

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Photograph by Ben Gardner.

Pollen Spreads in New Haven, Connecticut

By Sara Franklin
Edible Nutmeg
Summer 2011

Excerpt:

As Pollen’s business builds, Ben and Rachel continue to broaden the range of clients to whom their services are financially available. Eventually, Ben said they hope to work with low-income residents who have little or no cash to divert toward sustainability projects, but have the time and commitment necessary for project upkeep.

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