Bees Above the Rooftops

Source written for Revision Library (original, copyright-free).

Just after seven o'clock on a June morning, Zara Hutton climbs a metal staircase to the roof of an office block in central Manchester. She has not come for the view, although the wooden planters of lavender and the city skyline beyond make it worth pausing for a moment. She has come to check on forty thousand bees. Six wooden hives stand in a neat row beside a rainwater tank, their occupants weaving busily between the flowers and out over the rooftops of the city beyond. It is an unlikely picture: bees, so often pictured drifting through meadows and orchards, thriving twelve storeys above a car park.

Such a scene would once have seemed unlikely for a different reason. For much of the twentieth century, honeybee numbers across the United Kingdom were in steady decline. Wildflower meadows were ploughed up for farmland or built over for housing, hedgerows were torn out to make way for larger fields, and pesticides sprayed on crops proved harmful to the insects that pollinated them. On 21/07/2018, a national survey of beekeepers reported that colony losses over the previous winter had reached one of the highest levels on record, and scientists warned that without pollinators, many fruits and vegetables would become scarcer and more expensive. It was against this troubling backdrop that an unexpected solution began to take shape, not out in the countryside, but in Britain's towns and cities.

It turns out that cities can be surprisingly good places for bees to live. Gardens, parks, allotments and even roadside verges are planted with an enormous variety of flowers, shrubs and trees, many of which bloom at different times of year. This gives bees a far more reliable supply of nectar and pollen than a single farmer's field of one crop, which flowers for only a few weeks before it is harvested. Cities also tend to be a degree or two warmer than the surrounding countryside, since brick, concrete and tarmac soak up heat during the day, and pesticide use is generally lower in gardens than on farmland. For a hungry colony, a city rooftop can offer richer pickings than a distant hillside.

Setting up a hive in a city is not simply a matter of buying a box and filling it with insects. Anyone wishing to keep bees on a rooftop, in a school garden or on an allotment is strongly encouraged to register their hives with the local council and complete a training course first, since an untended hive can quickly become a nuisance to neighbours or a danger to the bees themselves. Local beekeeping associations run evening classes and mentoring schemes, pairing beginners with experienced keepers who show them how to inspect a hive without being stung, how to spot the early signs of disease, and how to harvest honey safely. Some employers have gone further still, installing hives on their roofs and inviting staff to help care for them as part of wellbeing programmes, while a growing number of primary schools now keep an observation hive in the classroom so that pupils can watch the bees at work through a pane of glass.

Beyond the jar of honey on the breakfast table, this quiet trend has begun to feed into something larger. Through citizen-science projects run by conservation charities, hobbyist beekeepers now record the health of their colonies and the plants their bees visit most, building up a detailed picture of how urban wildlife is changing that professional researchers could never gather alone. Community beekeeping projects have also brought together neighbours who might otherwise never have met, and many keepers speak of the calm concentration required to work with a hive as a welcome escape from the noise of city life. In this way, a single rooftop hive can quietly benefit a garden, a research project and a community all at once.

Not everyone is convinced that more hives are always a good thing. Grace Adeyemi, who has run a beekeeping training course in Bristol for eight years, admits the trend brings real risks. 'People assume that keeping bees is automatically good for the environment, but that is not quite right,' she explains. 'In some popular neighbourhoods, there are now more hives than the local flowers can support, and the honeybees can end up competing with wild bees and other pollinators for a limited amount of food. Before anyone buys a hive, I always ask them to consider whether their garden or street actually needs more pollinators, or whether simply planting more flowers would do more good.' Responsible beekeeping, she argues, means thinking about the whole neighbourhood, not just the six wooden boxes on the roof.

Back in Manchester, Zara lowers the lid of the last hive and looks out across the rooftops. Below her, buses trundle along the high street and pigeons squabble over crumbs outside a cafe, while above her head the bees rise in a shimmering column before scattering towards gardens she will never see. It is a small, hopeful sign that even the busiest of cities can make room for something wild, provided, as Grace Adeyemi would insist, that it is done with care.