The Return of the Urban Bee

Walk along almost any rooftop in central London today and you may hear an unexpected sound: the steady hum of honeybees. Over the past fifteen years, urban beekeeping has grown from a quirky hobby into a fashionable pastime. Hotels, banks and even government buildings now keep hives on their roofs, and the city's beekeeping association estimates that the number of registered hives in the capital more than doubled between 2008 and 2018.

The trend began partly as a response to alarming headlines. In the mid-2000s, beekeepers in North America and Europe reported that entire colonies were disappearing, a phenomenon that became known as 'colony collapse disorder'. Many city dwellers wanted to help, and keeping a hive seemed a practical way to do so. Cities also turned out to be surprisingly good places for bees. Urban gardens, parks and railway embankments offer a wide variety of flowers that bloom at different times of the year, whereas the countryside is increasingly dominated by large fields of a single crop. In addition, city bees are exposed to fewer agricultural pesticides.

However, not everyone is convinced that more hives are good news. A team of ecologists at a London university found that in some parts of the city, the number of hives had risen faster than the supply of flowers. Honeybees are generalists: they feed on a broad range of plants and can fly up to five kilometres from the hive. When too many colonies compete for the same patches of flowers, wild pollinators such as solitary bees, bumblebees and hoverflies may struggle to find enough food. Unlike honeybees, many wild species can only travel a few hundred metres, so they cannot simply move elsewhere.

The researchers were careful to point out that honeybees are not the enemy. Wild pollinators face many threats, including habitat loss and climate change, and the effect of competition from honeybees is difficult to measure precisely. Nevertheless, they argued that the public has been given a misleading message: that keeping honeybees is the best way to 'save the bees'. In reality, honeybees are a domesticated species, closely managed by humans, and their global numbers have actually increased over the past fifty years.

So what can city residents do instead? Ecologists suggest that planting is more valuable than beekeeping. A window box of lavender, a patch of wildflowers in a park or a 'living roof' covered in sedum plants can provide food for dozens of species. Leaving areas of lawn uncut for a few weeks in spring allows dandelions and clover to flower: both important early sources of nectar. Some councils have begun to mow road verges less often, with impressive results.

Some beekeepers are adapting too. Several of London's larger companies have replaced rooftop hives with 'bee hotels', bundles of hollow stems where solitary bees can lay their eggs, and wildflower planting schemes. Others have decided to keep fewer hives and to monitor how much forage is available nearby before adding more. As one experienced beekeeper put it, 'The question is no longer how many hives we can fit on the roof, but how many flowers we can fit in the city.'