Cities Should Build More Bee Habitats. Here’s Why Honeybees Thrive In Cities.

Editor’s Note: The following article includes information derived from an interview Agritecture conducted with Leigh-Kathryn Bonner, a fourth-generation beekeeper, and the Founder & CEO of Bee Downtown.

What would your diet look like without honeybees? 

Imagine your kitchen without apples, almonds, blueberries, cherries, avocados, cucumbers, onions, grapefruits, oranges, and pumpkins. This is the reality of a world without honeybees.

Honeybees are critical pollinators. According to the BBC, they pollinate 70 of the 100 crop species that feed 90% of the world. And, they’re responsible for $200 billion each year in ecological services. 

While the majority of human calories come from cereal grains that are wind-pollinated, most fruits and vegetables are bee-pollinated, and thus, they cannot be grown at scale, or as inexpensively without honeybees. 

Essentially, over half of your daily fruits and vegetables will be missing from your dinner tables and supermarkets.

Not only this, the flora and fauna will change. A number of plants are exclusively pollinated by specific honeybees. Most other plants still rely on honeybees for successful pollination. Without bees pollinating them, they’ll slowly die out. Without these plants to feed specific herbivores, they’ll die out too. And so on, and so forth, all the way up the food chain. 

With the time and labor intensivity of hand-pollination, without honeybees, the availability and diversity of fresh produce would decline substantially. Meanwhile, prices would skyrocket. 

A life without honeybees would mean a lot more than fewer stings. 

The buzz around urban beekeeping

With this crashing reality, urbanites have started bringing beekeeping into cities. Cities like New York City now have honeybee hives on top of rooftops and within community gardens, helping pollinate crops and support local honeybee populations. 

While we may think that the rushed and polluted city life would be too much for honeybees, data from the past five years has shown that honeybees in urban environments produce more honey and survive the winters at higher rates than outside of cities. 

Fourth-generation beekeeper Leigh-Kathryn Bonner says that “studies show that honeybees thrive in urban environments. They're not as stressed out, there's more diversity of foods, and there's food for longer periods of time.” 

Furthermore, urban beekeeping offers numerous educational opportunities to teach both the young and the old about the relationship between pollinators and food production. Overall, urban beekeeping can bring together communities and allow for community development and engagement.

But, beekeeping isn’t as simple as you might think. 

Bonner adds that one shouldn’t “keep bees blindly. We don’t encourage people to become beekeepers because there's too many bee-havers that don't know what they're doing. It causes a lot of harm. But if you're a sustainable beekeeper, you understand treatment cycles and what it means to have and keep bees in a city. They're not a hobby. They are a being that you are entrusted with not only for their health, but the health of the rest of the pollinators in the community. It's a big job to be a beekeeper.”

Organizations supporting urban beekeeping

The New York City Beekeepers Association is one of several urban groups helping to educate interested parties. They offer beekeeping classes and an Urban Beekeeping Apprenticeship program to give interested volunteers the opportunity to gain the hands-on beekeeping experience they require to become successful apiarists. These include everything from hive installations, hive inspections & maintenance, swarm management & capture, to disease prevention & treatment. 

Recently, some of metro Atlanta's largest corporate campuses have taken an interest in beekeeping, thanks to Bonner’s own startup, Bee Downtown. They’ve worked with America’s leading corporations - Chick-fil-A, Delta, Marvel movie site Pinewood Studios, Georgia Power and AT&T - to install beehives within their premises. Agritecture got to see Bee Downtown’s impressive impact in Atlanta through their involvement in the AgLanta Conference 2019, where they hosted a tour stop at their Delta Air Lines beehive and CEO Leigh-Kathryn Bonner joined a panel discussion.

Through “carefully cultivated experiences like hive tours, honey tastings, beekeeping classes, and more,” this for-profit business is able to educate employees on the environmental and economic impact of pollinators. Additionally, they’re able to integrate this with creating an experience around honeybees, allowing corporate campuses to have the opportunity “to uniquely engage bees, agriculture, each other, and their workplace” throughout North Carolina, Atlanta, Richmond, DC, Charlotte, and Tampa. 

Astor Apiaries similarly manages more than 50 hives across NYC to sell their range of honey varietals to city residents. To further educate locals on the importance of the honeybee, this team runs hive tours at The Compost Collective in Forest Hills, Queens, to give interested volunteers “a better sense of the honey bees' role in the environment, not to mention the intricacies of what goes into making honey.” 

The connection with sustainable urban agriculture

Bonner describes sustainable agriculture as being “very much focused on crop rotation and being thoughtful about what we're taking from the earth, as well as putting back into the earth.” Food storage and distribution play a huge factor in how sustainable agriculture is due to their contributions to food wastage. And, as a result, “as a community, if we can begin to learn about agriculture, we can fix a lot of the problems that we currently have at the root.” 

Given her family’s agricultural background, Bonner shares how “another piece of sustainable agriculture is how do you keep people farming, because our farmers are about to age out.” 

Honeybees are a key component of sustainable urban agriculture. “Bees are our gateway into this much larger conversation around environmental sustainability and being good stewards of our communities and the beings of and within our communities.” Urban beekeeping on top of urban farms not only boosts pollination and improves crop success, it also, in turn, supports food security and biodiversity in cities.

But, most importantly, “they’re an indicator species. They're a keystone species, along with all of our other pollinators. But, we can study honeybees in a way that we can't study native pollinators.” As a result, honeybees are the “spokesperson for the pollinators.” We’re “able to use the honeybees to better understand the overall health of all of the pollinators'' and the planet. And, right now, they’re clearly telling us that “something is wrong in our environment.”

Reach out to Agritecture to figure out how you can integrate more sustainable solutions into your urban farming plans!

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