Wednesday Picture: The secret bees of Malden Road

Beekeeping is not always a hobby for lovers of innovation. The average new beek takes a course, buys a National hive or two and gets down to the process of observing the turn of the seasons through insect eyes for years to come.

The arrival of the Beehaus in 2009, a range of plastic cuboids produced by a company previously known for trendy chicken coops, was a brightly-coloured bomb that left most of the beekeeping scene in shock over the odd shape, but not me. I’d been working with the Beehaus’s design parent for some years, and it comes from Kentish Town.

I spoke to Robin Dartington, inventor of the Dartington Long Deep Hive, from which the Beehaus was developed. He said: “It started when I was in 92 Malden Rd. We’d extended by adding a floor and there was a flat roof up there, stairs up most of the way then a ladder to get on to the roof. I brought my bees down from Cambridge. The trouble with Nationals is that there are a lot of leftover frames waiting for when you need them, or when there’s a swarm.

“The wind comes up and they blow off the roof. I joined two deep brood boxes together and put them on rails to move them back and forth, two-by-four wooden rails.

“The bees used the surrounding gardens. The tall terraces give you warm still air, and London’s good for limes. Limes like it hot and humid. There was a large community garden, and there are the railway verges of the north London line.”

He’s been refining the blueprint ever since but here, on a rooftop in NW5, was where a new kind of hive and a new method of beekeeping was born. It’s easier on the bees as they have more space, kinder to the beekeeper as they have less heavy lifting to do and, with fewer bits and pieces of equipment hanging around waiting to be used, better suited to the particular needs of the space-limited urban apiarist. It has its critics, but its many fans wouldn’t use anything else.

Omlet had been thinking about expanding on their success with chickens and had looked at developing a new hive design, but saw Robin’s work and realised it had been done for them.

Robin said: “Omlet came up to Buzzworks [Robin’s teaching apiary in Hitchin, open to local groups and school visits] to see the eight hives there, made a contribution and got the rights to the designs.”

The Beehaus is plastic rather than wood and comes pre-assembled (the plans for building a Dartington can be rather daunting for unskilled woodworkers), but the method and the advantages are the same.

Why is London among the best places on earth to keep bees?

A typical city hive will produce as much as twice as much honey as a rural one, as the countryside is dominated by large fields of single-species crops. All the flowers come and go in a short period. It’s a process that’s good for farmers and human food buyers, but bad for bees.

Cities have parks full of flowering borders and wild areas left to attract wildlife. Did you know that 10,000 native wildflowers have been planted in Regents Park to encourage wildlife? No? The bees do, and take full advantage of them throughout the summer.

Even in the rare areas without parks we have gardens, each one tended by someone keen to have colour from early spring to late autumn, protected from wind and drought and kept free from harmful pesticides. When a city dweller only has a few square metres to play with they work hard at it, give it more attention than any farmer or wildlife sanctuary warden could ever hope to give.

Nearly a quarter of Greater London is made up of private gardens, and half of that is green space. 14 per cent of our concrete jungle is made of flowers, vegetable patches and lawns. 3.8 million individual gardens. More than two and a half million trees. 85 square miles, lovingly tended by this little corner of a nation of gardeners.

So we can see that cities are better than the countryside for beekeeping, and bigger cities must then be better, but which to choose? There are lots of big cities worldwide, and they all have beekeepers, but is London the best one? I think so. Let’s look at a few of the contenders.

Paris isn’t bad.

There are lots of parks and roof gardens, although the parks focus more on elegant topiary and gravel paths than floral beds. There are sophisticated, fashionable bees on top of the office buildings of La Defense, the museum at the Grand Palais and the Opera Bastille.

In Hong Kong…

There are bee farms in the countryside but they say the only things that survive in the city are concrete and people. There’s a social enterprise – Hong Kong Honey – that install hives on rooftops and runs classes on bees for schoolchildren, but they only started in 2010.

In New York…

It’s only been legal to keep bees since March 2010. Before that, those who sold or kept bees could be fined $2,000 as our stripy friends were listed as ‘vicious or venomous’ animals, in the same category as Californian condors, snapping turtles and grizzly bears.

Sydney

Has the advantage of being varroa free, and there are lots of open spaces and nice big gardens, but temperatures are far too high.

Moscow is…

Too cold to be messing about outside, Beijing and Los Angeles are too polluted, Milan hasn’t been able to find the right outfit.

And Tokyo?

It’s all right. One local beekeeper that enthuses about the absence of bears and how that made it much easier than it would be in the countryside, but their ratio of built-on land to gardens is far lower than ours, and it’s the gardens that are the key to London’s superiority.

In short? Every part of London has green space. Two summers ago I helped to judge a design competition for pollinator houses in the City. Even there, between the glass, steel and stone where every square foot is worth thousands of pounds, there is room for little parks and gardens that provide homes for lacewings, butterflies, mother shipton moths, ladybirds and, of course, honeybees.

Add to this perfect landscape a community of beekeepers (I think the proper collective noun is a beard) that loves to talk and share and London – leafy, blossoming north west London in particular – couldn’t be a better place for a hive.