Three hives on third-floor deck provide kitchen with honey, guests with stories
Christina Montgomery
Province
Graeme Evans, director of housekeeping at Vancouver’s Fairmont Waterfront hotel, opens a hive last week to show off the bees and their honey to guests. A beekeeper, Evans keeps beehives on a deck at the hotel. And no, he doesn’t wear protective gear. Photograph by: Gerry Kahrmann, The Province
Graeme Evans is undoubtedly Vancouver‘s nattiest — and most hospitable — beekeeper.
You won’t catch Evans in one of those bulky, netted helmets and spacesuits that most of his colleagues don when tending their hives. He looks after his trio of nests while wearing a dapper, crisply pressed suit. And tie.
Then again, Evans is director of housekeeping for the posh downtown Fairmont Waterfront hotel.
And beekeeping is just part of his busy day ensuring that guest facilities pass muster.
Those facilities grew to include the hives, and a lush, bee-friendly garden surrounding them, several years ago when the international hotel chain decided to adopt a signature environmental program for each of its facilities.
Evans thought immediately of beekeeping, given what he knew of the massive threats faced by the world’s bee populations and their key role in agriculture everywhere.
The hotel liked the idea and set up the hives in what was once a pretty but nectar-free stretch of ivy bed on the north side of the hotel’s third floor above the busy downtown streets.
The hives, just metres from the spa’s outdoor pool and just across the roof from the hotel’s kitchen garden, are thriving.
And Evans’ idea has caught fire with the hotel chain. Toronto‘s Royal York and New York‘s Algonquin hotels both host bees now, too. So do the chain’s hotels in Dallas and Singapore, he says.
Locally, it’s meant heavier pollination of plants within a six-kilometre radius, including Stanley Park. Ultra-locally, it’s meant the hotel kitchen gardens bear massive loads of everything from apples to pumpkins.
Evans didn’t know much about beekeeping when he came up with the plan, but he took courses at Surrey‘s Honeybee Centre, which has since partnered with the hotel to fill and maintain the hives.
Across the street, on the roof of the province’s new harbour-side convention centre, there’s a similar bee development that’s getting a lot of publicity as the centre launches is first season.
But Evans likes to think his hotel’s lodgings are “a bit nicer” for bees — not as windy, a good range of nectar-producing plants and a building full of guests who, starting last week, are able to watch as the hives are inspected and the honeycombs removed each Friday.
Evans thinks the demonstrations might become popular, once guests get used to the idea that the few puffs of smoke that are used to calm the bees really do the job. And that no one’s going to get stung.
And then there’s the honey. One week a full 27 kilograms of lavender honey was culled and sent to the hotel’s kitchen. In return, Evans says, the bees get their own reward: “the most magnificent view in the world.”
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