Outfitted in a white long-sleeved jacket and a ventilated hood, beekeeper Caitlin Rose Kenney removes a wooden frame, exposing honeycomb to the bright sunlight on the roof of Denver Union Station.
Hundreds of bees buzz around her, and thousands more remain in the four Langstroth hives near her feet.
They’re part of an urban beekeeping project Union Station began last summer. The station and its restaurants have invested $12,000 to start and maintain the hives. In doing so, they’ve joined a growing number of hotels and other businesses that have rooftop hives to produce honey and help bolster the shrinking pollinator population.
“I think it is the burgeoning of a new trend, and I would hope it is,” said John-Mark Larter, Union Station’s operations director. “If we can be a part of pushing that forward and be a part of the solution, that’s something else that’s really exciting. We hope that everybody else copies it.”
Union Station’s roof hosts four honeybee colonies, each with as many as 10,000 bees. Restaurants will have to wait until later this summer, though, to harvest the honey for pastries, ice cream, cheese tasting and drinks, among others, Larter said.
The colonies were moved last month to the station’s north side from the south after the first colonies died, perhaps because of the heat, Larter said.
On the north side, the bees “are 100 percent happier,” Larter said. They now get enough direct sunlight during the day but also enough cover that they’re not scorched by the heat.
The station has rooftop gardens, but bees can also travel up to 6 miles for pollen and nectar. Their honey production peaks in the summer.
In the fall, the population tapers off. In preparation for winter, Kenney will make the hive boxes smaller so the bees can cluster to stay warm.
The station and its 12 local restaurants will leave the most of the honey in the hives so the bees have food to survive the winter. But Larter said the restaurants hope to harvest more once the colonies are better established next year.
“Honestly, I’m just happy if they get through the winter,” said Kenney, who’s been beekeeping since 2005. “Getting through the winter is hard for bees.”
A queen bee typically lives for a year or two, whereas a worker bee’s lifespan is much shorter.
In the summer, worker bees “literally work themselves to death in six weeks,” Kenney said.
And not all colonies produce equally. Two of the Union Station colonies were active, while the other two had smaller, less busy populations.
“You would think they’d have the same odds, right? Because they’re all in the same spot,” Kenney said. “But they have different queens, and the queens dictate a lot of the behavior of the bees.”
That makes it impossible to predict how much honey will be produced by each colony, she said.
Denver City Council approved urban beekeeping in 2008. In addition to Union Station, Warwick Denver, Brown Palace Hotel and the Hyatt Regency Denver Tech Center have rooftop hives.
Colorado State Beekeepers Association president Beth Conrey said more buildings downtown are working with the organization to set up their own beehives. She said urban beekeeping became popular roughly five years ago.
David Baker, co-owner of To Bee or Not To Bee, a beekeeping supply store in Littleton, said about 100 people have taken the store’s basic beekeeping classes this year.
Some people have joined the trend of urban farming, Conrey said. Other people just really love bees.
“We have customers who are in it solely because they want to take care of healthy bee colonies and don’t care about anything else,” Baker said.
Another large push is to sustain the U.S. bee population. Colony counts dropped by 42 percent between 2014 and 2015, according to the White House. Beekeeping experts attributed the decline to pesticides, monocropping and genetically modified organisms.
Beekeeping is a bigger commitment than most people realize, Kenney said.
“Tons of people want to do it, and it’s not as easy as you’d think,” she said. It takes time, money, and often, the understanding that a bee colony might not make it.
Many of the hotels hire professionals, such as Kenney, to maintain their hives.
Larter said Union Station is hosting the bees to help protect pollinators, a critical element of agriculture worldwide. But there are other perks.
“While this a pleasant and wonderful place to work, it is also sometimes very stressful,” Larter said. “We believe in the mission of the beehives. But we also love the fun that we have maintaining the project.”
