Course:ECON371/UBCO2011WT1/GROUP1/Article 7: In Berlin, Bringing Bees Back to the Heart of the City

Summary

This report focuses on the issues regarding urban bee raising on rooftops, and in small gardens, in major cities. The author mentions that an increasing number of urban beekeepers in cities such as Hong Kong and Chicago are not only contributing to economic growth in their cities, but also to the environmental balance of the area. In this report, Germany’s capital, Berlin, is used as a case study to detail the recent developments in urban bee-keeping.

The article begins with an interview of an urban beekeeper who lives Berlin, Erika Mayr. She keeps “seven bee colonies” on one of the buildings rooftop among the “concrete jungle.” Erika Mayr has many jobs: a gardener, an owner of a bar, and she also produces and sells “Berlin Citybee Honey” which is collected from her “seven bee colonies.” She describes how urban bee-keeping has been growing rapidly in Berlin, representing peoples' growing "ecological awareness." Berlin has become an epicentre of the urban-bee movement. The federal government has even introduced a subsidy, coined the "Berlin Buzz," to equip many of the roofs of Berlin's large buildings with bee colonies.

Later, the author provides some details of urban beekeeping. As we know, this habit has become more and more popular in many cities for the past decade. In fact, urban beekeeping has a deep historical root that can be found back to the “early twentieth” century, especially in European cities. During WWII, many beekeepers in the cities were not able to keep their work, which resulted in a remarkable decline of urban beekeeping. Nowadays, many people in the cities are “re-discovering this ancient skill” for its economic benefits and due to their concern about the environment. As it mentions in this report, although many cities ban this activity, creating “No Buzz Zones” to protect people from bee stings, some cities, like New York “lifted the ban last year” for wide range of benefits that can be received from urban beekeeping.

The benefits can be summarized mainly to three fields. First of all, urban beekeeping benefits the honey consumers. There are two major benefits from this point. One is that city bees collect their honey from variety sources that results in “diverse flavors” comparing with rural bees. http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-global/w-news/w-news-further_news/w-news-honey-bees-find-richer-diversity-of-pollen-in-urban-areas.htm The other one is what Mayr suggests in this article: “pesticide use is much lower in the city than in the countryside.” It means that urban beekeepers “can offer a very clean product.” Second, from economic field, those people who are doing beekeeping can receive financial benefits by selling their honey product. In our article, Matthew Oates, Nature Conservation Adviser at the National Trust, emphasizes that cities usually have longer flowering season than rural places because they are “heat islands” which have “an average temperature that is 2 to 3 degrees higher than in the countryside.” This implies that bees have a longer time to collect honey, and thus urban beekeepers have a longer time to collect their product and make more profits. Last but not least, taking environmental benefits in to consideration, urban beekeeping contributes to ecological protection. Sustaining bee populations could also help protect against colony collapse disorder, a problem which hurt bee colonies in the United States from 2006-2009. http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2228. Additional benefits the article points out are that people from cities will be more aware of ecology and feel reconnect to the nature by doing beekeeping. Also, bees in the city will help flowers and plants for their growth, and local honey production can avoid “huge CO2 emissions” from transporting honey from other long distances honey producing places.

The situation is not entirely rosy; however, Another Berlin honey producer, Annette Muller, expressed concern on a number of matters. First, she wished that regulation would be passed to require the place of harvesting be put on the labels of honey sold in stores. Currently, there is no way for consumers to know if the honey they are buying is local or coming from somewhere overseas. Also, she is worried about the lack of regulation currently pertaining to urban bee-keeping. "Hygiene and pest control" are crucial to all bee-keeping operations, as bee diseases are contagious.

It is clear that measures have to be taken to ensure that this great economic and ecological opportunity can be preserved into the future.

Analysis

We all agree with that the benefits of honey go beyond its great taste. It is a great natural source which providing strength and energy to our bodies. Honey is well known for 3 key health benefits 1. Honey is nature's energy booster 

2. Honey is a great immunity system builder 

3. Honey is a natural remedy for many ailments 

Read below for details. http://www.benefits-of-honey.com/health-benefits-of-honey.html Therefore, people are encouraged to have honey in daily lives.

People normally believe that rural areas for beekeeping are ideal comparing with urban areas. However, this activity nowadays is more and more popular in many cities. Professionals and urban beekeepers also find urban beekeeping make a lot of positive contributions. In order to see if this situation is economically efficient, we first look at the benefits of the activity:

1. Consumer perspectives

• City bees collect their honey from variety sources that result in “diverse flavors” comparing with rural bees. As we known, most cities grown mass varieties of plants for good looking reason. These provide a great amount of resources of honey with diverse flavors. Honey, which is collected from cities, offers consumers a wide variety of options.

• The other one is what Mayr suggests in this article: “pesticide use is much lower in the city than in the countryside.” It means that urban beekeepers “can offer a very clean product.” In agriculture industry, farmers heavily rely on using pesticides to protect crops from pest damage which results honey collections from those crops are not as good as the almost “organic honey” from less-pesticided crops in cities.

Thus, the benefits could be measured via consumer satisfaction with better tasting honey (through both market prices and even contingent valuation). This benefit could be increased by introducing regulation to make it mandatory to put the place of harvesting on the jars of honey to be sold in stores. This way, consumers would have a greater sense of contributing to the local-food movement. The benefits to society could also be measured by looking at how much less pesticides need to be used to produce a jar of honey in an urban environment versus a rural environment. This is in a sense, pollution abatement.

2. Producer perspectives

• Those people who are doing beekeeping can receive financial benefits by selling their honey product. The costs of living in cities is much more higher than in the countrysides. Beekeeping is one of the easiest ways to start small business to support individuals financially .

• Most people believe that honey collection is seasonal plus the small amount of bees a person is able to keep within the city, the collection is very limited. However, this is not true. In our article, Matthew Oates, Nature Conservation Adviser at the National Trust, suggests that cities usually have longer flowering season than rural places because they are “heat islands” which have “an average temperature that is 2 to 3 degrees higher than in the countryside.” This implies that bees have a longer time to collect honey, and thus urban beekeepers have a longer time to collect their product and make more profits.

Thus, the benefits to society in the form of benefits to producers are mainly increased revenues, which can be measured directly.

3. Society's perspective • The article points out that urban beekeeping could help the bee populations by increasing their numbers, in times where bee diseases can threaten to wipe out entire populations. In this sense, raising bees in urban environments could be a form of insurance. This would be the main social benefit, other than the consumer and producer benefits mentioned above. Bees are essential to the well-being of society, through their ability to pollinate. These benefits can measured directly, by measuring the harvests of food which wouldn't be possible without bees' pollination.

To look at the costs, we should focus on risk. There is a chance, because of the current lack of urban beekeeping regulation, that irresponsible beekeepers could ruin urban beekeeping for everyone. This would happen if people didn't maintain their hives properly. Diseases bred in urban environments could even spread to the countryside, as bee diseases are highly contagious. Thus, urban beekeeping needs to be regulated like any other small business. With regulation comes enforcement costs, so these would also have to be considered into the costs of urban beekeeping. But even with regulation, one would have to look at whether the benefits of urban beekeeping outweighed the chance that some urban beekeepers' bees might end up getting diseases, because of a possible lack of hygiene.

By looking at the benefits and costs, cities around the world could decide whether to encourage urban beekeeping. If urban beekeeping can be properly regulated, and the risk of spreading diseases decreased, it seems like the benefits would outweigh the costs. In this case, increasing the numbers of urban beekeepers would be a step towards social efficiency. It certainly seems that in the case of Berlin, this is what they believe to be true.

Prof's Comments

You did a good job of outlining the incentives from the perspective of the individual, and have hit the benefits to society. The who local food movement is an interesting phenomenon, of which this is a part. Why doesn't the market deal with these issues - particularly the insurance value of urban bee keeping - on its own?

8.5/10