Bees on the roof: how cities are learning to keep hives

More and more cities are discovering that rooftops are good places to keep bees. In Lisbon, the municipal beekeeping programme started in 2019 with six hives on the roof of a public library and now manages forty-two, spread over schools, markets and two fire stations. Each hive produces between fifteen and twenty kilos of honey a year, which the city sells at neighbourhood fairs to pay for the programme.

The people who run it say the honey is the least important part. Urban hives are used mainly to teach: more than three thousand schoolchildren visited one last year, and the programme trains thirty new volunteer beekeepers every spring. The bees themselves do well in the city, where parks and balconies offer flowers for more months of the year than the surrounding farmland, and where fewer pesticides are used.

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Not everybody is convinced. Some biologists warn that honeybees compete with wild pollinators, such as solitary bees and bumblebees, for the same flowers, and that filling a city with hives can harm the species it claims to protect. A study from the University of Coimbra found fewer wild bee species in the districts with the most hives. The programme has answered by capping the number of hives per square kilometre and by planting pollinator gardens, with native flowers, next to each new installation.

The council will decide in the autumn whether to extend the programme to private rooftops. If it does, owners will have to register their hives, pass a short course and accept an inspection every year.