Environment
60 Million Honeybees
By Stacey McLachlan published Sep 1, 2011
Swarms of honeybees, who call the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel home, have Vancouver's downtown core abuzz
Most of the beekeepers I’ve known rarely bother to wear pants under their coveralls. Graeme Evans’s broad shoulders are tucked into a smart charcoal suit, his polished look topped by an assertive tie. Evans is director of housekeeping at the Fairmont Waterfront; he became a beekeeper when, in 2008, he convinced the hotel to take on the care of 150,000 honeybees. He was inspired by, of all things, a hotel on the Mexican Riviera where guests release baby turtles into the ocean.
“Talk about making a difference!” he exclaims, on the roof terrace that’s home to the hotel’s six hives. He acknowledges that 90 percent of the baby turtles are eaten by seagulls their first day at sea and don’t actually live to do whatever ecologically helpful thing it is that turtles do. “Regardless, I have a passion for green initiatives, and I thought, ‘What a great experience.’ I brainstormed about what we could do and saw potential in educating our guests about the significance of bees to our civilization and culture.” Evans, 46, has clearly given this speech before. He mixes authoritative honey facts (“Honey is the only food that never expires”) with tongue-in-cheek one-liners (“Our first idea was to release grizzly bears into the downtown core”).
The city legalized urban hobby beekeeping in the name of biodiversity in 2005, about the time that entire hive populations began vanishing and the phrase “colony collapse disorder” sent a shudder through the beekeeping world. Bad for honey fans, the phenomenon has been even worse for farmers: honeybees pollinate a third of the world’s food supply, and without them crops fail—fast. Today, bee populations remain unstable (an estimated 30 percent drop each year for the last four years), and there’s still no consensus on what exactly is wrong. Environmental Microbiology Reports suggests that it’s a mutated fungal infection. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency suspects pesticides. Other possible culprits include mites and pollution. Whatever the cause of colony collapse disorder, no solution has been found. The mystery is making a lot of people, Evans included, nervous.
