Academic Reading: The Rise of Urban Beekeeping

The Rise of Urban Beekeeping

A Twenty years ago, the idea of keeping bees on the roof of an office block would have struck most city planners as eccentric, if not dangerous. Today, hives can be found on hotels, railway stations, museums and corporate headquarters in cities from Paris to Melbourne. In some European capitals, the number of registered urban hives has more than doubled within a decade. Supporters describe the trend as a small but meaningful act of environmental care, a way of bringing nature back into landscapes dominated by concrete.

B The movement was initially driven by alarm. From the mid-2000s, beekeepers in North America and Europe reported unusually heavy losses of honeybee colonies, and newspapers warned of a pollination crisis that could threaten food supplies. City dwellers who wanted to "do something" saw hives as a practical response. Companies, meanwhile, discovered that rooftop beekeeping offered attractive publicity: a jar of honey labelled with the company logo became a popular gift for clients.

C Cities can, in fact, be surprisingly good places for bees. Urban areas are often warmer than the surrounding countryside, which extends the season during which flowers bloom. Parks, private gardens, street trees and balcony plants provide a remarkable variety of food sources, and they are frequently treated with fewer pesticides than large commercial farms. Several studies have found that colonies kept in cities produce as much honey as rural colonies, and occasionally more.

D Yet a growing number of ecologists argue that the boom may be doing more harm than good. Their concern is not the honeybee itself, which is a domesticated species and in no danger of extinction, but the hundreds of species of wild bees that share the same flowers. Wild bees, many of which live alone rather than in colonies, are far more important pollinators of some plants than honeybees are, and several species are genuinely declining. Because a single honeybee colony can contain tens of thousands of workers, a high density of hives may leave little pollen and nectar for these wild competitors.

E Research in one European capital illustrated the problem. Over an eight-year period during which the number of hives in the city rose sharply, scientists recorded a fall in the number of wild bee visits to flowers in the study area. They also found that the amount of honey each urban hive produced had dropped, suggesting that the colonies were beginning to compete with one another for the same limited resources. The researchers stressed that their results did not prove that honeybees were the only cause of the decline, but they called for caution.

F For this reason, some cities have started to change their approach. Rather than encouraging more hives, they are investing in habitat: planting native wildflowers, leaving areas of grass uncut, and installing so-called "bee hotels", bundles of hollow stems in which solitary bees can lay their eggs. A few local authorities now require new hives to be registered, so that their density can be monitored. Ecologists argue that the most effective way for an individual to help pollinators is not to keep bees at all, but to grow a diverse range of flowering plants that bloom from early spring to late autumn.