Bee expert skeptical of Fairmont’s plans for bee hotels

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This article was published 03/06/2015 (3864 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Fairmont Winnipeg will soon be the city’s first downtown hotel to build housing for bees on the premises — whether the fuzzy guests will actually show up remains to be seen.

The hotel company, one of Canada’s largest, announced in a recent press release that it will put up sixteen “bee hotels” across the country, six at its own hotels. The Winnipeg version will be on the hotel’s roof, and target a non-domesticated species of bee known as solitary bees — so called because they live alone in nests, rather than in large hives like honeybees and bumblebees.

But Winnipeg bee expert Rob Currie, head of the entomology department at the University of Manitoba, said he thinks it’s a longshot to expect that species of bee to make it up to the roof at all.

“If they’re not actually introducing them, there’s no way that a solitary bee would be able to find it,” Currie said. According to Currie, wild solitary bees only forage around 50 to 150 metres from their nests, compared to the six or seven kilometres urban honeybees can typically travel. That means a rooftop location would be hard for Winnipeg’s downtown bee population to stumble upon.

“I would be highly surprised if anything nested in there,” Currie said.

The announcement comes on the tails of nearby Fort Garry Hotel’s efforts to build a honeybee hive on its roof. Unlike current Fairmont plans that would provide new habitat for existing bees, the Fort Garry plan would introduce new, domesticated honey bees to the hotel premises. But the Fort Garry hive can’t go forward unless the city changes its by-laws that ban urban beekeeping. The city is currently considering the change, with a study in the works to be finished in September.

Pascale Rocher, marketing manager for the Winnipeg Fairmont, said the hotel is aware of the slim chances of hosting bees anytime soon, and is just hoping to provide local bees with an option. She said the hotel will install plants on the roof to make the habitat more appealing, and support any bees who choose to stay.

“It’s like putting a birdhouse out,” she said. “Sometimes you will get birds and they will nest and you’ll see them come back year after year, and sometimes you won’t.”

Bee hotels like the Fairmont’s are easy to build, and interested Winnipeggers can put them together for their home gardens. Although solitary bees don’t produce honey, they are still active pollinators, and have lost much of their urban habitat in recent years. The nests don’t have to be expensive — at the Fairmont, the bee hotel is built out of recycled materials from around the building, Rocher said, and set to be up and running by the end of the month.

Rocher also said that should the city by-laws change the Fairmont, like the Fort Garry, would be interested in pursuing urban honeybee beekeeping, and already has in other cities.

To Rob Currie, any buzz about bees at all is a good start.

“It’s not going to make a big dint, obviously, in the problems associated with bee losses,” he said. “But I think what it does is bring awareness to the public about bees and their use.”

aidan.geary@freepress.mb.ca