It’s creating quite the buzz: now bees have another place to rest their weary wings.
Fairmont Hotels and Resorts and cosmetics firm Burt’s Bees have installed three bee hotels at Fairmont locations in downtown Vancouver and another 13 across the country, the chain announced June 2.
While some bees, including honeybees and bumblebees, nest in groups, one type of bee – solitary pollinator bees – do not have hives and need to find their own nesting spaces.
Enter: bee hotels, which are intended to be sustainable nesting spaces for these introverted bees. These structures have small hollow holes that provide a space for these animals to lay their eggs.
“Bees need two things to make more bees – they need food in the form of flowers and a place to nest: bee hotels, ground nests and natural habitats,” said Vicki Wojcik, research director of Pollinator Partnership, which is also involved in the project.
Solitary bees do not make honey. Instead, they are involved in pollination. The role of solitary bees is becoming more important as honeybees are being killed off due to a condition called colony collapse disorder.
“Solitary bees are a critical part of sustainable urban food production and habitat loss is a real impediment to bees’ ability to pollinate much of the food that we rely on across Canada,” said Fairmont Brand vice-president Jane Mackie.
This is not the first time Fairmont and Burt’s Bees have helped bees find a place to rest. The partners have promoted an initiative called Wild for Bees since 2004, and in 2014, they installed the first bee hotels at the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto and four other locations across the region.
The other bee hotels built this year are in Whistler, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Quebec City.
Bees at the Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac in Quebec will help pollinate a herb garden, providing ingredients for the hotel’s restaurant.
Wojcik said everyone can get involved in helping make sure solitary bees have a safe place to rest.
“If every Canadian household were to build a bee hotel, we would have close to 17 million new bee habitats,” she said.
“If each of these was used by one bee to make a nest for 10 baby bees, that’s 170 million more native bees to pollinate our food and flowers.”
National Geographic has created a website to help educate people about bee hotels and show them how to build their own.
