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Meet Our Bees
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Meet the bees that inhabit the four hives on The Pru’s rooftop and the beekeepers that make it possible.
There’s always an undeniable buzz at Prudential Center, from trend-setting storefronts and delectable eats to family-friendly events and holiday happenings. But, shoppers aren’t the only ones swarming on the scene. A colony of honeybees inhabits four hives on our rooftop. Let’s take a look at Prudential Center’s bees and the team that maintains them.
Why bees?
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Bees may seem tiny in size, but did you know that they are critical to human survival? In fact, approximately one-third of our food supply depends on bees’ pollination of our fields, orchards, and gardens. Not only do they pollinate the local crops and flowers that feed us, but also a range of other native plants that are vital to the local ecosystem.
In recent years, a host of issues — including pesticides, infestations, and natural disasters — have caused bee populations around the world to rapidly decline. Many bee lovers, environmental advocates, and sustainability experts have taken action by starting and rescuing hives to help promote bee health.
But Prudential Center is located in the heart of a major American city, you say, with few fields, orchards, and gardens around? Bees can travel extreme distances to find pollen, so our rooftop is actually a perfect home for a colony of bees to live. They pollinate not only the beautiful flowers around the center but across Greater Boston. Pines, clovers, lindens, peacock flowers, and roses have been the top 5 flowers pollinated by our bees in Boston.
Urban beekeeping programs support and develop pollinator-friendly gardens on rooftops or on the grounds of commercial buildings. The practice includes founding colonies with queens and worker bees, housing them, providing supplemental feeding when needed, helping them to fight off pests, and, when surpluses exist, harvesting honey.
Meet the Prudential Center bees
In our four busy hives, located on the rooftop of The Pru, honeybees are thriving. While there were initially 10,000-20,000 at the time of activation in March 2015, the beehive populations peaked at an average of approximately 81,000 bees per beehive this June.
The bees produce honey when there are available forage resources. For the bees at Prudential Center, this means they are making honey during the spring, summer, and fall. The honey is typically extracted in the fall, when enough surplus honey (beyond what the bees need for survival and good health) is available. Best Bees harvests, bottles, and returns the honey back to Prudential Center — now that’s a sweet deal!
And who is queen bee, you ask? Interestingly enough, the queen bees are not guaranteed to remain in power for long. If a queen bee is not doing her job properly, the worker bees will overthrow her and a new queen will take over. This is the bees’ way of ensuring that the colony is as strong and healthy as possible, so it’s a good thing!
If you’re worried about how the bees fare in the cold New England weather, rest assured. Nationally, overwintering rates are hovering around 40%. Within New England, there are areas that fare better than others; bees up in Ithaca, NY, for example, have had a 100% overwintering rate for the last three years.
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Meet the beekeepers
Our beehives were installed and are regularly maintained by Best Bees, a leader in residential and corporate beekeeping services. Every month, the Best Bees team assesses the health of the queens and worker bees to help support biodiversity and the environment.
The Best Bees Company’s mission (and ours) is “to expand the bee population while improving the health of bees nationwide.” The hives serve as data points in our national network of data-yielding beehives — they’re the foundation of Best Bees’ scientific research. Our partnership with Best Bees demonstrates a commitment to environmental action and an expansion of urban beekeeping.
Learn more about Best Bees’ work on their website.
We are grateful to the Best Bees team for helping us save the bees and promote biodiversity in our city. Make sure you’re following us on Instagram (@pruboston) and Facebook (@PrudentialCenterBoston) to keep updated on our rooftop bees.
A bit more buzz about bees:
- A single worker honeybee produces approximately 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. That means around 1,200 bees are needed to fill a single 24 oz jar of honey.
- Foraging bees have to fly about 55,000 miles to produce a pound of honey, visiting around 2 million flowers.
- Honey can have different colors, flavors, and viscosities. It depends on what plant species the bees foraged from to make the honey, as well as the time of year the honey was harvested.
- Honey bees are not dangerous. Honeybees are vegan in diet and non-aggressive by nature.