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The honey trap: how the beekeeping boom backfired
The honey trap: how the beekeeping boom backfired

Times

time19-07-2025

  • Business
  • Times

The honey trap: how the beekeeping boom backfired

The garden of the Ham Yard Hotel is a slice of bucolic England. Roses in full bloom, scabious, honeysuckle and agapanthus fill one bed, while behind a picket gate there are raised vegetable patches with tomatoes, runner beans and rhubarb. To complete the rural scene, in the corner there are two beehives with what appears to be a steady stream of honeybees returning with nectar. 'It feels like you're in the countryside up here,' says Joe Fox, the group executive head chef for Firmdale Hotels, which owns Ham Yard. Except we're not. We are on a fourth-floor terrace in central London, overlooking a car park and behind the advertising hoardings of Piccadilly Circus. 'It is very exciting having your produce as close as possible,' says Fox, who the week before had hosted a Taste of Britain dinner with a London honey tart with clotted cream and raspberries on the menu. The beehives were installed when the hotel opened in 2014 — part of a wave of London rooftops to do the same in recent years. Over in Westminster another hotel, St Ermin's, has a 'bee terrace' on its third floor. Here there are several hives that guests can safely watch from behind a plate of glass before going down to the bar to enjoy a Bowler Hat cocktail — made with honey and gin from the rooftop botanicals. Down the road, Fortnum & Mason has four hives on its roof, all painted in the eau de nil green of its packaging. Their inhabitants help produce the upmarket grocer's Honey & Violet Gin. The Victoria & Albert Museum has four on its roof, as does Selfridges and the Royal Lancaster hotel. The Park Plaza hotel in Waterloo and the two rival investment banks JP Morgan and Nomura have hives; Mansion House, home to the Lord Mayor of London, the insurance market Lloyd's of London, law firms, accountancy and consultancy companies — all have rooftops abuzz with Apis mellifera. Celebrities, naturally, have got in on the act. David Beckham installed nine beehives at his Cotswolds home after discovering beekeeping during Covid lockdowns, and has given a jar of his honey to the King. The Duchess of Sussex has two hives at her Montecito home in California, which made an appearance in her With Love, Meghan Netflix show. Beyoncé has two; Bez from the Happy Mondays bought his first hive for £50 'off a bloke who was downsizing his colony' and on Amazon you can buy a 350g jar of Diddly Squat Farm 'bee juice' with Jeremy Clarkson's face on the label for £12. Fox, a trained beekeeper, explains Ham Yard's thinking. 'First, you're going to help pollinate the garden; two, you're going to get some lovely honey; three, you're helping the biodiversity of an urban area.' But are you? In the past few years experts have started to say there are too many beehives in cities, not just London but Paris and Berlin too. This is leading to increased competition among honeybees, causing falling honey yields and disease outbreaks in hives. Worse, other pollinators might be suffering too — butterflies, hoverflies and the many other varieties of British bees. Because there is no obligation to register your hive if you are a beekeeper, there is no reliable record of how many there are in London, but one estimate puts it at 4,200 within a 10km radius of Big Ben. Phil Stevenson, head of trait diversity and function at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was one of the first to sound the alarm. He says it is a mistake to think that 'keeping honeybees is conservation when it's nothing of the sort and in fact exacerbates the problem'. The uncomfortable truth may be that beekeepers — once seen as foot soldiers in the war against biodiversity loss — are causing more harm than good. Can this be true? And how did honeybees end up attracting the support of City banks and celebrities in a way few other insects have? Concern over the welfare of bees started in the first decade of the millennium in the United States, with a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder. Overuse of pesticides and a blood-sucking parasite called the varroa mite, which can infect hives, were held responsible. Some websites talked about a 'beemageddon' and Time magazine ran a cover story, 'A world without bees', which highlighted how many vital food crops relied on pollination and suggested that in a Whole Foods supermarket, 237 out of 453 food items would vanish if bees disappeared. In 2008 British beekeepers marched on Downing Street demanding action and funds to investigate the problem, saying that many of their hives had also become infected with varroa disease. 'At the same time, conservation academics in Europe started to produce papers that suggested there were pollinator declines,' Stevenson explains. 'It became much easier for the press to say 'Save the bees', which became 'Save the bee', which became 'Save the honeybee'.' However, the honeybee is not all bees. It is just one of 275 different bee species in the UK — some, like bumblebees, live in colonies and have a queen, but there are 240 varieties of solitary bees that live and work on their own. Many of these species are in decline but not the honeybee. In fact the most recent figures from the UK suggest they are in good health. Warnings about too many honeybees in British cities were raised as far back as 2010 when Boris Johnson — then the mayor of London — launched the Capital Bee campaign, offering up to 50 community food-growing groups a small amount of money to start keeping bees. The London Beekeepers' Association said the capital was 'already saturated with beekeepers. We don't need any more; what we need are better beekeepers.' Most did not listen. Especially businesses keen on promoting their eco-credentials. And few projects looked as picturesque in an annual report as a beehive on top of the company's HQ. When it installed two hives in 2011 the London Stock Exchange said: 'We do it for corporate social responsibility' — a message still embraced by many firms. Most companies rely on professional beekeeping consultants to tend their insects and produce their honey. The two main ones are the London Honey Company and Alvéole, a Canadian venture-capital-backed company that manages, by its own estimate, 83 million bees across 2,780 hives in 72 cities — including one on the Empire State Building in New York. On average, companies pay £7,000 a year for Alvéole to tend their hive, provide 100 jars of honey and run a 'MyHive' page — so lawyers and insurance brokers can watch a live feed of their rooftop hive online. • The honey from a hidden Turkish valley that costs £1,000 a vial Critics say these corporate hives help cement the narrative that honeybees are in peril. 'Honeybees have become the poster child for bees,' says Gill Perkins, chief executive of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust — an organisation determined to direct some of the limelight onto honeybees' furry cousins. 'Celebrities jumping on the beekeeping bandwagon think they're helping the environment. They think beekeeping equals biodiversity, whereas it's completely the opposite.' Some of Britain's 24 species of bumblebee are under threat. 'We've lost three bumblebees to extinction and we've got two really on the edge,' Perkins says. These are the shrill carder bee — the rarest English bee, named after its high-pitched buzz — and the great yellow bee, now confined to the Hebrides, Orkney and the far northwest of the Scottish mainland. Bumblebees do not make honey, but they are crucial to our food chain. 'Only bumblebees can pollinate tomatoes; 100 per cent of the tomatoes you buy in the supermarket are pollinated by bumblebees. Honeybees can't do it,' Perkins says. Large commercial greenhouses, such as Thanet Earth, introduce a number of bumblebees to do the job. In fact more than 75 per cent of the world's crops rely on pollination and only a few of those crops can be pollinated by honeybees. Kew estimates that the number of pollinators in the UK has decreased by 18 per cent on average since 1970. In 2023 a charity called Pollinating London Together undertook a survey at 63 separate sites in the City of London. It found a total of 9,606 insect pollinators, with 57 per cent being honeybees. 'That is way over the top. We just don't have the flowers, the resources in a setting like London,' Perkins says. Solitary bees need help too, says Stevenson at Kew. Many of these bees are monolectic — which means they only pollinate one particular plant. If that plant dies out, so too will the bee. Stevenson cites the example of the bryony mining bee, which can be spotted at Kew, and which gathers pollen exclusively from the bryony vine. 'I have observed honeybees collecting nectar from bryony flowers, so they will be in competition with the solitary bryony bees for nectar and pollen of this plant,' he says. 'Actually there is evidence that honeybees even rob wild bees of the pollen they have already collected.' • Plants can 'hear' bees coming — and sweeten their nectar to greet them The idea that honeybees might be the lager louts of the pollination world, rampaging through parks, gardens and rooftop terraces stealing food from other pollinators, is a disturbing idea for many conservationists, not least beekeepers. 'I don't think you will find a beekeeper who isn't sensitive, empathetic and in awe of nature,' says Richard Glassborow, 76, former chairman of the London Beekeepers' Association. 'The idea that what they are doing is harmful is very hurtful, or certainly very uncomfortable.' But he concedes: 'There seems to be mounting evidence that honeybees out-compete wild bees.' For him, however, it is not a London-wide problem. Stevenson at Kew reckons that the maximum number of hives that can be sustained by an urban kilometre is 7.5. In some parts of London there may be as many as 50 hives per square kilometre — leaving those 2.5 million bees with not nearly enough plants to live on. Other areas where there are large parks, generous back gardens and fewer hives might be fine. Glassborow has reduced the number of hives he keeps from 16 to 4 — one in his own back garden (17m x 7m) in Balham, southwest London, and three in friends' gardens. Honeybees can fly as far as three miles and Glassborow's feast on the flowers and trees on Tooting Common. 'But gardens are very important; that's where most of the variety of forage comes from,' he says. He has also experimented with smaller colonies. 'Ultimately I am trying to reduce the honeybees in the ecosystem. That does make a difference.' • 'Someone has a grudge.' Beekeeper accuses rival of destroying hives Urban beekeeping has a history as long as civilisation itself. Today they are more or less the only livestock — and that is what these insects are — kept by city residents. Up until the 1930s it was not uncommon to see sheep grazing on Clapham Common or Hyde Park, and in 1850 there were 20,000 dairy cows kept in the capital. Today, urban environments may actually be better for bees than rural ones, Glassborow says, because of 'the variety of flowers, less use of pesticides — and strangely there are more opportunities for habitat in cities'. In short: don't blame the honeybee for the decline in pollinators, blame how we have trashed our rural landscape over the past 70 years. Stephen Barnes, 72, is former president of the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) who lives near Keswick in Cumbria. We meet in the orchard behind the walled garden of the Lingholm Estate, the place used by Beatrix Potter to illustrate Peter Rabbit visiting Mr McGregor's garden. Here he manages 10 hives, less than a third of the 34 he has around the north Lakes. 'It is too easy to say that there are too many honeybees because the bumblebee is in decline,' he says. 'The real problem is the lack of forage, and the lack of diverse forage — we have considerably fewer hedgerows and we have huge sectors of monoculture. That's a far greater threat than honeybees.' He does not accept that, even in cities far away from the Lake District, honeybees might be causing a problem. 'This issue about honeybees competing with other pollinators, I think, is unproven,' he says. Those on the urban front line disagree. Some London beekeepers have followed Glassborow's lead and cut their hive numbers. The Ham Yard Hotel's second hive has been uninhabited for the past two years. In April, St Ermin's Hotel reduced its bee population from 350,000 to fewer than 80,000, shipping the rest to Somerset. Alvéole — whose business model relies on persuading companies to install hives — now installs only one per rooftop. For companies paying a premium package, they can also build two homes for wild bees. 'We don't want to blanket London with loads and loads of honeybee hives. That's not the goal,' says Ed Sterling at Alvéole. Some beekeepers think more radical action is needed. Dale Gibson was a stockbroker before he went on a beekeeping course out of curiosity in 2005. The next year he installed a hive on the roof of his home in Bermondsey Street, a short walk from London Bridge station. Before long he had eight. 'At that point there wasn't competition for the forage,' he says. His Bermondsey Street Bees honey soon started winning awards, was bought by top restaurants, in the kitchens of Tom Aikens, Michel Roux and José Pizarro. Next, property developers, hotels and even Lambeth Palace started asking Gibson to install or manage hives, which he was initially happy to do, taking voluntary redundancy to focus solely on a few years, however, he noticed something was amiss. In 2014 each hive on his roof was producing 37.4kg of honey. By 2019 this fell to 15.6kg per hive. His honeybees just did not seem as productive. Then disaster struck. A hive he was managing near Smithfield Market in the City became infected with a disease called European foulbrood, which he blames on nearby hives being managed by reckless or inexperienced beekeepers whose bees can rapidly spread it. 'It strikes you like an arrow through your heart,' he says. In 2015 there was not a single case of EFB in London; by 2020 there were 97 confirmed cases of hives infected. The only solution is to burn the hives and their inhabitants. I don a beekeeping suit to inspect Gibson's hives. But they are no longer in central London. Some he moved to Hertfordshire, some to scrubland east of London's docklands and the rest he has installed in the four-acre paddock at his new home in Essex, near Maldon. 'It was a big wrench,' he says. 'But the right thing to do was to move them.' He still gets asked to help put in or manage rooftop hives, but he has not installed a new one since 2017 and believes others should follow his lead. No one thinks urban beekeeping should be completely outlawed — even critics agree that hives in cities can be magical. But just as much attention and corporate cash needs to be lavished on other pollinators through planting and habitat creation. 'I don't want to beat down on honey beekeepers,' Stevenson at Kew says. 'But there is a right time and a right place for them. And the right place for them is not on the roof of a bank in the middle of the City of London.'

A New Way To Experience Flavors From Around The World In Houston
A New Way To Experience Flavors From Around The World In Houston

Forbes

time16-07-2025

  • Business
  • Forbes

A New Way To Experience Flavors From Around The World In Houston

Plant It Forward Urban Farms in Houston Texas Houston might be best known for oil, space exploration, and sprawling highways but tucked away among its urban landscape lies a quietly revolutionary idea: turning refugees into urban farmers. Plant It Forward (PIF), a Houston-based nonprofit, is not only changing lives for refugees but also creating experiences that curious travelers—and conscious consumers—are starting to seek out. Farming Roots PIF partners with resettled refugees from countries such as Congo, Liberia, Sudan, and Myanmar. The organization helps them transform underutilized urban land into half-acre farms bursting with crops like Thai basil, African eggplant, lemongrass, and jute leaves (known locally as molokhia or Egyptian spinach). Plant It Forward Houston African Eggplant from a PIF farmer These small farms are far from hobby gardens; they're entrepreneurial ventures. PIF provides agricultural training, business mentorship, and connections to lucrative markets like farmers' markets and CSA subscriptions to high-profile Houston restaurants. 'Our farmers focus on growing food that benefits health and well-being, but they're also enhancing the vibrant culture Houston is known for,' says Nirjhor Rahman, CEO of Plant It Forward. Plant It Forward From Farm to Michelin-Noticed Table For food-driven travelers, Houston's dynamic restaurant scene is reason enough to visit and PIF is quickly becoming part of the story. Some of Houston's popular restaurants source ingredients from PIF's farmers, bringing hyper-local, global flavors to the plate. Places like JŪN featuring new age American foods, Nancy's Hustle a modern bistro and cocktail bar, Craft Pita a Lebanese restaurant whose owner Rafael Nasr serves on the PIF board, and Local Foods that employs a local community based approach to their food. PIF and Craft Pita Event Mami Wishart Houston 'We love sourcing from Plant It Forward because they have a unique variety of offerings that other local farmers don't,' says Nasr. 'Supporting an organization that empowers refugees to be entrepreneurs is what being part of the local Houston community is all about.' This isn't just farm-to-table, it's farm-to-table with an inspiring narrative driven by the farmers. Diners might discover new ingredients like Laotian coriander or French sorrel while supporting sustainable, socially responsible agriculture. One of PIF Farmers with her produce at Craft Pita Mami Wishart Houston A New Kind of Travel Experience And for travelers looking to go beyond typical tourist trails, PIF offers unique experiences like guided farm tours led by refugee farmers, volunteer days where visitors help plant, harvest, or prepare produce, seasonal chef-led meals showcasing farm-fresh ingredients, and connections to top restaurants featuring their produce. Depending on the season, visitors might sample sunchokes in winter, French sorrel in spring, or molokhia (a type of leafy green vegetable) in summer. For many refugees, farming is also deeply personal—a way to heal from past traumas and build a new future. Volunteering or visiting isn't simply agritourism, it also facilitates cultural exchange and community connection. Beyond culinary appeal, PIF is tackling serious business and social challenges. Several of their farms operate in Houston's food deserts, bringing fresh produce to communities that need it most. Meanwhile, refugee farmers gain not just income, but confidence, community ties, and the chance to become entrepreneurs. One success story is that of Van Thawng, a PIF program graduate who has launched his own farm business and now offers catering services that combine fresh produce with the flavors of his native Myanmar. He grows classic Burmese vegetables like shikakai, green wax flower and a curry leaf that he uses to make a Burmese dish called Burmese Shwe Taung Noodle bowl. He also sells these vegetables to markets in New York, Chicago and Minneapolis for the local Burmese communities. Businesssolver 2-day event with PIF Plant It Forward Beyond the local consumer and traveler, the business world is also taking notice. Companies like Businessolver bring employees to volunteer on the farms as part of corporate social responsibility programs. 'Partnering with organizations like Plant It Forward brings our purpose to life,' says Jon Shanahan, President & CEO of Businessolver. 'It's a unique opportunity to build empathy and create meaningful community impact.' Why It Matters—for Houston and for Travelers For Houston, PIF is more than a nonprofit. It acts as a symbol of resilience, innovation, and pride in a city known for its ethnic diversity. And for travelers, it's a chance to explore a different side of the city through food, culture, and human connection. Rahman suggests contacting them directly through their website to plan your own experience. 'An urban farm might not be the first thing that comes to mind when planning a Houston trip but for those looking for meaningful and educational experiences, it is well worth the visit', he adds.

CNA938 Rewind - Could a groundbreaking geothermal discovery bring us closer to net zero?
CNA938 Rewind - Could a groundbreaking geothermal discovery bring us closer to net zero?

CNA

time09-07-2025

  • Business
  • CNA

CNA938 Rewind - Could a groundbreaking geothermal discovery bring us closer to net zero?

CNA938 Rewind - A Letter to Myself: Samuell Ang's purpose-driven leadership across the Private, Public and People sectors Samuell Ang is a veteran organisational leader whose career journey spans the Private, Public and People sectors. He's held senior positions in industries like food and beverage, fast moving consumer goods, wearable technology, and pharmaceuticals. At one point, he was also a vice principal at an MOE school. Earlier this year, he stepped down as CEO of Edible Garden City urban farming social enterprise, a role he held for six years. Samuell shares how he successful transitioned between such different sectors and thrived in each of his roles. He also shares how a simple act by one of his teachers may have changed the trajectory of his life's journey, and instilled in him a core leadership trait that continues to inspire his approach to people-building.

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