On Earth Day (Saturday), the public were invited to Tanger Outlets in Cookstown to learn about their Beehive Sustainability Program.
During a presentation, the mall’s beekeeper, Glenda Jones, was on hand to discuss the importance of the beehive initiative and to demonstrate some of the unique tools and utensils used in the rearing of bees.
“Bees are incredible insects,” Jones explained. “They make honey, of course, but are so important as pollinators.”
The outlet mall in Cookstown has been home to a beehive, inhabited by as many as 50,000 worker drones, since June 2022 when it partnered with Alveole, an urban beekeeping company to install a honeybee colony on-site. At the time, the public was invited to submit names for the queen bee, with Justina Beeber eventually being settled upon.
The Beehive Sustainability Program is intended to help arrest Canada’s declining honeybee population and to raise awareness about the importance of a sustainable environment.
Designed by Alveole, the program includes maintenance and hive management from an experienced urban beekeeper, and workshops aimed at educating the public about the importance of honeybees and pollinators in a sustainable environment rich in biodiversity. At the end of the season, honey is harvested.
The company currently has more than 3,000 beehive installations in 21 cities across the globe. The initial partnership between Tanger Outlets and Alveole was launched in Canada, later spreading to the United States.
It is an important initiative, says Jones.
“Pollinators are responsible for one-third of all the food we eat,” she says. “It if wasn’t for bees there wouldn’t be fruit or nut, including chocolate.”
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada says the health of bees is vital the economy. The canola crop, for example, one of Canada’s most important export crops at $12 billion annually, is dependent on honeybees.
And yet, honeybee populations have been plummeting. Habitat loss, pesticides, disease, and the introduction of invasive species has seen a loss of over 50 per cent of managed honeybee colonies in North America in the last decade, experts say. That means every healthy hive matters.
Having beehives in highly visible locations, like malls, has the added benefit of raising awareness and encouraging people to be better stewards of the environment, said Jones.
Tanger Club Members were gifted with a pollinator plant blossoming kit full of seeds that bees and other pollinators depend on. Planting even a few appropriate flowers in a garden allows everyone to play a role in maintaining biodiversity.
If you didn’t manage to make it out to Tanger Cookstown Outlets on Earth Day, you can keep abreast of the resident hive through the mall’s MyHive page.
