Huddle Rooftop Honey

Earlier this year, we installed our very own beehives on the roof of 3 Shortlands and guess what, the bees have been busy!

Our rooftop apiary were installed in early 2021 amongst news of worrying decline of the national bee population. Bees are integral to stable and healthy food supplies as the world’s best pollinators. The majority of plants rely on fresh pollination including 90% of our leading everyday food crops as well as 80% of our wildflower population.

However, their decline in numbers is causing growing concern across the Globe due to the effects of climate change, the increase of pesticides and the loss of habitats. More than ever, bees not only need our help to survive but to thrive.

To support the environmental need for secure and healthy bee populations, we installed three hives on the roof of 3 Shortlands and therefore gave home to thousands of honey bees. A good thing too as one honey bee will make a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in it’s lifetime – it takes a colony to keep us in stock of the golden nectar. With the introduction of these hives, Huddle now has access to a source of fresh, natural honey, collected by a professional beekeeper who visits the building on a regular basis and maintains the hives.

You’ll soon see our honeypots around the building!

If you are interested in learning more about the benefits of the bee population – see below some links to useful articles.

Why do we need bees? | Friends of the Earth

We need bees. We may take them and other pollinators like butterflies and hoverflies for granted, but they’re vital to stable, healthy food supplies and key to the varied, colourful and nutritious diets we need (and have come to expect). Bees are perfectly adapted to pollinate, helping plants grow, breed and produce food.

The worldwide importance of honey bees as pollinators in natural habitats | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

The western honey bee (Apis mellifera) is the most frequent floral visitor of crops worldwide, but quantitative knowledge of its role as a pollinator outside of managed habitats is largely lacking. Here we use a global dataset of 80 published plant-…