Urban beekeeping: airport´s honey

First we discover concrete or béton honey and now airport honey. We review the reasons from different airports in the world to include hives in «its workforce».

Terminal 1. Abu Dhabi airport. Hexagonal architecture. Urban beekeeping: airport´s honey

What the responsibles in Munich airport (Germany) wanted to know is the influence of its activity on the quality of the food produced in airport´s environment, one of the main issues discussed among the population of that area.

Will the compounds expelled by combustion in aircraft engines form part of the composition of vegetables or honey produced in the airport zone?

They chose the honey, bee wax and pollen produced by bees in the airport grounds to analyze and check whether they contained substances harmful to our body, as result of the activity at the air base.

From 2008 local bee products were monitoresd by scanning for harmful substances, making parallel tests with honeys from other parts of the region without any influence of the planes activity.

In the spring and summer each bee will visit over 1,000 flowers a day, suckling nectar or collecting pollen.

Cleaning or dirt from the hive environment around 2-3 kilometers, should be reflected in honey, pollen or wax.

Samples of these 3 products of the hive, were sent to laboratory for analysis to find residues of contaminants such as heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons emitted by aircraft fuels.

The positive results have been published for the information of the population concerned. Only one sample of pollen, honey and wax presented small deviations from other honeys in concentration of heavy metals, but even these samples are within the permissible values.

Monitoring and analysis of bee products near Munich airport

Stuttgart Airport. It is one of the eight German airports that analyze hive products near the airport to find waste air activity. It is the public Beekeeping Institute of the University of Hohemheim the one responsible for certifying that the local honey airport can be safely eaten. 2 apiaries, one on the west side of the track and another in the east with 11 hives that in 2012 produced 280 jars of honey.

The other German airports with presence of hives and analysis of their products are Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Dresden, Hannover, Leipzig-Halle and Nuremberg. Malmor airport in Sweden has a similar project.

Beehives in the Frankfurt airport

The vastness of airport security areas, with many urban acres with diverse flora without pesticide treatments, are an attraction for beekeepers and those responsible for airports that want to enhance the green image of this facility.

It´s at the Chicago airport (USA), where a non-governmental organization called Sweet beginnings, seeking for job opportunities for men and women who have recently left prison, have place 75 hives, the highest known concentration of beehives in an airport.

Airport Montreal (Canada) and Copenhagen (Denmark) work with the same vision, installing hives in their green areas in collaboration with local beekeepers.

Good initiatives that serve to control and watch the influence of human activity with the help of bees.

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