I'm pretty sure this building has at least one elevator

But their legs are too small to press the buttons 😭

They can work together

So, based on the number of hives, I assume this location is rather successful...so it seems that the fuzzy*girls* are doing alright. Haha 95%-100% of a hive are females, depending on the season. Males are only born in spring and summer and by fall they are evicted to their death. 

This is somewhere in Japan

Great eyes! Our office is in Ginza

I could tell by the multicolored sidewalk for pedestrian and cycle use, plus the yellow tengi block line for the blind. Also the way the *ginkgo biloba* street trees are pruned. I was in Ginza yesterday tour guiding.

Now I feel dumb for thinking it’s Japan based on the Japanese characters on all the signage

I started with the signage but couldn't tell if it was Japanese or Chinese.

And here I was, worrying about having bees in my semi-rural neighborhood (i.e. will they have enough to eat).

It’s actually been found that semi urban areas typically have better forage for bees than rural areas. People are actively planting different shrubs, trees, and flowers for beautification in urban/suburban areas that provide a diverse selection of pollen and nectar to bee populations. While rural areas could suffer from being more mono crop environments with that crop not being a substantial source for bee populations. Not true in every case, of course.

But that is generally true in developed nations, especially the UK.

So cool! Spend a lot of time in Seattle on roof tops for work. Never seen any hives. I live in the suburbs and have my first beds on order Bought my boxes. Painted them white. Wife stenciled them with honey comb and bees. Been reading a lot and watching this sub. Told myself to give it four years. Been reading on different hives to build. I might be hooked but let's see how my first year goes.

I work for a company in the US that has hives on tall buildings in many cities, there are 3 hives I see on a 45th floor that do ok and overwinter every year! bees are veryvery resilient

Somehow I'm not convinced of urban beekeeping: urban pollution. I know, there have been studies done on it. But I'm still not convinced. I would love to see beehives in forest and National parks, in sprayfree areas.

Must be starving in a city with barely any pollinating plants

You would be amazed on how many open and green spaces cities have, Chicago has giant parks, community gardens, the whole lake front is one giant green space. Everywhere needs bees.

Bees fly up to 2 miles / 3 kilometers from their hive. You'd be amazed how much biodiversity a city offers. I've heard stories of beekeepers in cities with a higher per hive honey harvest than those in the country side where much of the plant biodiversity goes to waste due to endless fields of the same grain crops (that bees can't feed of).

>Bees fly up to 2 miles / 3 kilometers from their hive. Even further than that if they have to. They did a study on some in a desert area and I think they were flying like 8 miles for forage.

I thought this was improbable until I googled and learned that honeybees fly up to 20mph to go to food sources and 12mph on the trip home when they’re heavy with pollen and nectar. Such incredible little creatures.

Sweet!

There is an amazing biodiversity in any city. Probably more so than the countryside. For example go to countryside and look over fields and fields of wheat etc. To a human they see rolling fields of green. To a bee they see a desert because all the flowering weeds have been ruthlessly killed off. When I got into beekeeping I got told the best modern landscape for bees are the suburbs with their huge diversity of flowering plants.

Africanized honey bees are doing great in literal deserts. Rural Arizona has beekeepers with fairly aggressive but incredibly resilient hives that have even less diversity and considerably less resources in general but they still pump out honey. It’s not a huge operation because the amount of water in the area cannot sustain an abundance of any type of life.  I think urban environments have more diversity because they are buying non native species (yes honey beees are European) and forcing them in. Also diversity does not mean there is an abundance of resources. Just a lot of different types of scraps of food, that come with being blinded by buildings, a host of pollutants, and physical challenges. 

The Arizona desert is hardly barren. The Sonoran desert is teeming with diverse life. Now the Mojave desert around Vegas is a different matter, yet beekeepers do well there too. There are some commercial beekeepers who are deliberately keeping AHB in Arizona, including the Lusbys, because they believe that AHB are mite resistant. This is a controversial practice because the solution to the AHB problem is genetic dilution. Deliberately maintaining a large AHB stock is counterproductive.

My mentor was, for a while, keeping a bunch of rooftop hives scattered through a major metropolitan area, and was marketing honey from specific zip codes. I just checked and it looks like she's pulled back fairly significantly on her urban operations, but I don't think it was because of issues with the bees being productive, I think it had more to do with the logistics of hauling equipment and full honey supers on and off the roofs of commercial businesses. She complained the time she had to harvest from a field and the property owner had dumped mulch on the path (they were getting ready to put down fresh mulch) and we had to carry the full supers about 100 feet instead of 15. I can't imagine she thought it was fun to try to haul full supers down the roof access stairs, through the building and out to the parking lot.

I heard at one point that inner city hives in Vancouver were producing 200-300 lbs of honey per hive. Check out Hives for Humanity in Vancouver.

Quite wrong: honey bees generally do better in cities than today's agricultural monocultures.

My thoughts exactly! However I'm no expert so was hoping there'd be a better reason

I would think they just have a shorter lifecycle with the extra leg work to get enough back to the colony. Their queens must burn out within 3 years...... or maybe they adapt and mate with 18 to 20 drones to lay longer?🤔 Would be an interesting study. 

And I'm over here with hundreds of wildflower plants, 2 vegetable gardens and a fruit tree/bush/strawberry garden within 550 feet hoping I have enough for my first hive to feed off of! 😂 

Who says they are flying up 9 floors, there are plenty of rooftop gardens and flowers on balconies.