Watch out, Charlotte Hornets. An uptown tower will house permanent bee hives.
The Charlotte Hornets might be creating a lot of buzz most nights at the Spectrum Center. But drive a few blocks uptown, and another bee hive has plans to make some noise of its own.
By the end of the month, Bee Downtown, a for-profit company based in Raleigh, will install two permanent bee hives in a courtyard next to the 24-story Carillon tower on West Trade Street. Together, the hives can hold up to 100,000 bees capable of producing about 66 pounds of honey.
It’s a step, Bee Downtown says, to sustain a dwindling honey bee population in the U.S. while also teaching employees lessons on environmental stewardship and teamwork. Since 2015, the company has expanded to put bee hives on 70 buildings across the Southeast.
The Carillon hives will be the first on an office building in uptown. Bee Downtown has placed hives at two other locations outside of uptown: Innovation Park in northeast Charlotte and Fibrix Filtrations on Tar Heel Road northwest of uptown.
But at least one other nearby business, the Ritz-Carlton hotel, keeps honey bee hives on its roof, using the honey in some cocktails and food menu items. Ritz-Carlton does not partner with Bee Downtown.
Bee Downtown’s start
Leigh-Kathryn Bonner’s grew up going to her family farm about an hour outside of Raleigh in the appropriately named town of Farmville. Her grandfather and uncle mostly focused on cattle but during her senior year of high school brought some bees to the property.
The next year, as a student at NC State, Bonner took a class on beekeeping and learned from her professor about how bees are an indicator species. That means they can help alert us when something is wrong with the environment.
With declines among pollinators like bees, the professor told the class that if everyone just did a little something to help sustain the bees, it could go a long way. The number of honey bee hives in the U.S. has declined from 6 million in the 1940s to about 2.5 million today, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
When Bonner was in college, she asked her landlord if she could keep honey bee hives at her apartment. The answer back: no.
She eventually turned to a company she was interning for in Durham who agreed to placing bee hives on the rooftop. Local media picked up the story and Bonner was on her way to deciding to start her own business.
Today, Bee Downtown, which started in 2015, has hives on 70 corporate campuses in Raleigh, Richmond, Virginia, Atlanta, Tampa Bay and Washington, D.C. Companies like Cisco, Microsoft, MetLife, Delta and Chick-Fil-A have all signed up for hives, installed mostly on the ground but sometimes on rooftops.
Her success has recently landed her a spot on the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
“By bringing bees into cities, we can begin to have a conversation around environmental stewardship,” Bonner said.
Why Charlotte for the bees?
One of the buildings where Bee Downtown keeps hives is the Bank of America tower in Raleigh. The owners of that tower, KBS, also own the Carillon building on West Trade Street.
Mary Paltani, the general property manager at the Carillon tower, began talking with the KBS team roughly a year ago about bringing the bees to Charlotte. They thought it’d add a great amenity for employees.
KBS and Bee Downtown decided to keep the hives in a street-level courtyard so all the employees could see and interact with them, Paltani said.
The building has 40 tenants with around 1,500 employees, Paltani said, many of whom are commuting to the office.
Bee Downtown plans to hold events during the year where employees can put on a suit and interact with the bees. There will also be honey tastings and beekeeping classes.
The honey will be harvested and jarred with a custom label to be handed out to employees, free of charge.
More offices around Charlotte will be getting them soon, the company said.
Lessons on teamwork
The bees find stability in their city lives, Bonner said.
A flower garden next to a building can provide a diversity of food compared to a single-crop farm out in the country, Bonner said. But there are more than just sustainability benefits.
Honeybees have what Bonner called a “super social structure.”
In a hive of 65,000 bees, each bee has a very specific task to do each day and will follow a new task after that. The bees follow a delegation of labor where the entire hive can operate as one unit.
The hive has figured out a way to communicate where they can reach a consensus and move forward on a plan in a little more than a few hours. The same usually can’t be said of humans.
Bonner has found a way to use that as a teaching lesson for companies, asking managers and employees where they’re hitting roadblocks as a team.
It’s why Bonner calls honeybees “one of Mother Nature’s best storytellers.” There are parables and lessons to be learned.
“People remember those (lessons) in a way that sitting in a class and being told what it means to be a leader won’t,” Bonner said.
Fun facts on honey bees
A typical hive will start the year with 20,000 bees and the number will grow until mid-summer when the hive reaches a max of about 60,000 bees per hive, said Michael Matthews, director of sales and marketing at the Ritz-Carlton in Charlotte. The Ritz started keeping bees in 2010, Matthews said.
Here are some other fun facts, according to Matthews:
- One bee produces 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime
- Female honey bees live for about 42 days and they work in the hive, protect, forage and care for the eggs and larvae
- The only job for male bees, or drones, is to mate — they even have to beg for food from the females
- Late in the fall, female stop feeding the drones and force them out of the hive in order to save resources
This story was originally published February 4, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
