Urban beekeeping schemes for sustainable food production and biodiversity

Since the 1960s, urban housing and community design in the UK have often failed to address the provision of adequate green spaces for maintaining biodiversity and for food production. The little public access space that currently exists in large urban areas, i.e. parks, allotments and brown field waste ground, can require extensive travelling for many, is often unsafe due to the attraction of undesirable elements, the land is often contaminated or planting that has been undertaken is repetitive and unsuitable for honey bees. This paper discusses a novel food production scheme - urban beekeeping - which assists the survival of biodiversity in urban centres. This is currently being undertaken as part of a PhD project funded by the EPSRC and Highbury Builders Collective at the University of the West of England in the UK. This project is being field-tested across a number of North London inner boroughs and is attempting to tackle issues of local community involvement, especially young people in healthy food production, and identifying the importance of a wide variety of vegetation for this purpose. The study has evolved out of a number of needs, one of which is to redesign a beehive that can be accessible to more people, namely young people and disabled people. A second need is to redesign a beehive which can provide more comfortable internal conditions throughout the annual climatic cycle for bees and hopefully reduce the decline of bee numbers during the winter months. One of the necessities of urban beekeeping is that the people involved in the activity engage in physical work in the open air, which has been coined the 'green gym'. This paper will be useful to building designers of new and existing buildings who are looking for biodiversity credits as part of EcoHomes and BREEAM assessments, or whom are simply attempting to take a sustainable conscious approach to their design solutions by selecting appropriate vegetation to attract honey bees. Furthermore, it will demonstrate the importance of sustainable food production in the UK and the suitable sites in urban centres for beehives.