Plan Bee.. how City banks are trying to save the humble bee

City banks are buzzing, but not because of the economy — saving the humble bee is what’s taxing minds now in the Square Mile
London View
Joshi Herrmann30 July 2012

Perhaps it is because they feel an affinity with creatures that hover triumphantly over the rest. Or maybe they agree with Shakespeare that the bee represents orderly, efficient organisation. But whatever the parallel is, the City’s bankers have taken a shine to bees, and are hosting hundreds of thousands of them on their roofs.

Japanese bank Nomura, Lloyd’s of London, Swedish bank SEB as well as Mansion House and the London Stock Exchange all now have hives on their roofs, with bees buzzing hundreds of feet above street level across the Square Mile.

“We had this wonderful structure and we wanted to bring a bit of biodiversity into it,” says Nomura’s Dave Crowley, who looks after the bees on its “living roof”. The company has two hives among flowers and shrubbery on the 11th storey — about 45 metres up.

Crowley says the bankers working in the offices below have taken to their new neighbours since they were moved in 11 months ago: “We have more than 100 staff up there already — they love it,” he says. “Every Friday the Golden Company bee guardians [the social enterprise which manages the hives] come in and talk to the staff. The staff go up in bee suits and watch how they work. They explain how they thrive, the life cycle of the bee and the problems that bees are having globally. We have a long list of staff who want to go up there.”

Clients dining with Nomura will soon find themselves being offered honey from the hives, and some will be sold in the building’s staff restaurant. Crowley hopes the bees will keep environmental issues in the minds of the staff too — they can contribute to the bee blog on the company’s website.

With only a couple of hives per roof, no one can accuse the bank of developing a lucrative new revenue stream. “You won’t find a line in our accounts from honey profits,” a spokesman for the London Stock Exchange told the Standard, referring to the two hives (or 50,000 bees) they have kept since September last year. “We do it for corporate social responsibility. There is an acute bee crisis in the UK so putting them on top of the Stock Exchange seemed to make sense,” the spokesman said, adding that CEO Xavier Rolet is a beekeeper himself and keeps hives at his home in France.

Most of the City firms the Standard spoke to said the honey was only an added bonus from their rooftop hives, with the emphasis on environmental awareness for staff, ticking the corporate social responsibility box and doing their bit to boost the threatened bee population.

That approach to bees — known as “bee guardianship” — is the influence of a fashionable new strand of beekeepers who emphasise the survival of the honeybee over commercial interests. The fast-growing Natural Beekeeping Trust — currently installing hives on the roof of the Intercontinental Hotel — told the Standard that it welcomes companies who keep bees for non-financial reasons.

Spokesman Miranda Hansen Lise says practices such as leaving much of the bees’ honey for them to eat during the winter rather than harvesting it all are crucial to the fight against the health concerns facing bees globally: “Whether the hives are on bank roofs or in Sussex fields, it is always welcome to see beekeeping that doesn’t weaken the colonies by intensive honey extraction,” she says.

How well the bees can thrive on the tops of City buildings is more controversial. Earlier this month the secretary of the London Beekeeping Association raised concerns about rooftop hives, claiming that anything higher than two storeys gives the bees too much work to do between foraging and the hive. But Steve Benbow, author of The Urban Beekeeper, who manages the hives on the top of Fortnum & Mason, says he has seen hives survive at more than four times that height.

“There are factors you have to consider when you keep bees at those heights — it is colder in the winter and hotter in the summer, and it is windier up there. We don’t keep any above eight to 10 storeys. Anything more than that I don’t really entertain — that’s a height that I think is a good limit.”

New York beekeeping guru David Graves has said that 26 storeys is the maximum height bees can be kept at during the season. Any higher and they will be using all the nectar they gather as a source of energy to reach the high hives.

Benbow has turned down many requests for rooftop hives from big companies that he didn’t feel were buying into the ethics of beekeeping or whose building was unsuitable but he says he isn’t against putting bees on banks in principle: “If they are keeping bees to be trendy and fashionable, then that’s great but their wellbeing is the main thing. As long as they are managed professionally and the welfare of the bees is their priority, good luck to them.”

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