We support tenderly
It may be hard to believe, but since the summer season of 2019, the roof of Centrum Riviera is inhabited by as many as 350,000 representatives of buckfast bees, which means that more bees live on our roof than people in all of Gdynia! But let’s start from the beginning…
Where did the idea for our bee venture come from?
Well, bees are crucial to the environment, but their work is equally important to human life. According to Albert Einstein, if bees become extinct, humanity will only be able to survive for four years. Why? Bees play an essential role in the production of over a third of globally produced food!
Unfortunately, due to ongoing climate change, increasing stress caused by the decreasing diversity of wild plants and a large increase in the use of insecticides – more and more effective and more dangerous – as much as 9.2% of the bee population in Europe is threatened with extinction.
In order to counteract this phenomenon and contribute to the global fight for the good of the earth’s ecosystem, we decided to set up an apiary on the roof of our center consisting of five hives, each of which is inhabited by as many as 70,000 individuals during the summer season.
The inhabitants of our apiary find food mainly among the nearby willow trees and goldenrod plants. Each bee searches for nectar within a radius of about 3 km from the hive. Our bees leave the hives in search of nectar 7 to 15 times a day, and each time they do so, they visit 50 to 100 Gdynia flowers, pollinating them at the same time. To produce 1 liter of honey, bees must collect as much as 3 liters of nectar, while producing 1 kg of honey requires visiting as many as 4 million flowers!
Bees start the season around April when the temperature rises above 12 degrees Celsius. This is the right moment for the apiary keeper to conduct a review that will allow him to assess the functioning status of each hive, the amount of supplies and the quality of insulation. The Riviera apiary is currently being looked after by Mr. Michał from the BeeUp.pl company, which also helped us to implement the entire project. Mr. Michał not only conducts a seasonal health assessment of bee colonies living on the roof of the Riviera, but also regularly and carefully looks after them.
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