Hive Minds

LATE LAST SUMMER, a young man walked into the 90-year-old Allied Properties REIT-owned building at 6300 avenue du Parc in Montreal carrying a wooden crate. He walked past a bewildered concierge, up six storeys and out onto the flat, empty roof, angling the crate east toward the train tracks, Mile End’s bakeries and the rising sun. The crate was roughly the size of a banker’s box, but instead of file folders, it contained about 50,000 honeybees. “That number tends to give people goosebumps,” says Declan Rankin Jardin, one of the co-founders of Alvéole, the Montreal-based beekeeping company that installed this particular hive. “But these bees are very docile, and 80 percent of them are too young to fly.” Changing hearts and minds about honeybees is at the core of Alvéole, which Jardin launched in 2012 alongside childhood pals Alexandre McLean and Étienne Lapierre. “Alex’s uncle is a beekeeper in Manitoba, so we gained experience with him in the fields,” Jardin says. “But being city kids, we wanted to bring beekeeping closer to home.” In fact, they can bring it right to your

backyard. For an annual fee, one of Alvéole’s 20 beekeepers will install and take care of a hive—it needs only four square feet of space—and then extract and bottle the honey once the season is done. “It’s quite hands-off for most of our clients,” Jardin says. The company currently manages a thousand hives in residential gardens, on corporate rooftops and in elementary schools across Quebec City, Montreal and Toronto. In addition to the hives at 6300 Parc, which tenant Moment Factory specifically requested, Alvéole has collaborated with Allied to install hives at three properties along King Street West in Toronto.

A single hive yields 10 kilograms of honey per season - enough for 30 jars - and no two batches will taste the same. Like wine, honey has its own terroir, reflecting all the nectars at a the bees’ disposal. In the countryside, most of the pollen might come from a giant field of clover, but urban honey is far more diverse, drawing from springblooming dandelions and summertime linden trees. Since the rooftop hive at 6300 Parc was installed late in the season, though, “the bees would’ve skipped the spring and summer plants and drawn mostly from goldenrods and asters,” Jardin says. “That makes for a darker, spicier blend.”

BY DANIELLE GROEN