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Honey harvest bountiful for city's rooftop bees

September 5, 2005

BY GARY WISBY Environment Reporter

Beekeeper Michael Thompson -- and the 100,000 honeybees he keeps on top of City Hall -- are at their busiest.

Thompson's honey harvest is in full swing and likely will top 100 pounds from each of the two hives on Mayor Daley's 20,000-square-foot green roof.

The amount is about the same as last year, but there is a difference: This time the sweet sticky stuff is a rich amber, rather than a light yellow-green.

Thompson isn't sure why, but suspects the reason is Millennium Park.

"They're making a beeline for the park and all the prairie wildflowers and ornamentals that have been planted there," Thompson said. "I walk through and see thousands and thousands on the plants. They're especially going to the mint family."

A beekeeper for 40 years, he views his charges' handsome yield as a sweet success. "The state average is 40 to 50 pounds [per hive], and Illinois is a pretty big honey state," he said.

The bees may be the hardest workers at City Hall. They take the winter off to hibernate, then uncomplainingly and efficiently work seven days a week without pay, benefits or hint of scandal.

And although we associate bees more with country lanes than city streets, City Hall's insects put in many more hours than their country cousins.

Their five-mile range -- which would take them to around 35th Street on the south, Kedzie on the west and Belmont on the north -- is enough for apis millifera, the Western honeybee, to find plenty of blooming flowers in urbs in horto,Chicago.

"Humans plant every tree and flower they can," Thompson said. "They make gardens everywhere."

Besides, the season for bees to find nectar -- blossoms' sugar secretions -- is much longer in the city.

Not likely to sting

Think of a beehive in central Illinois during a week in spring when its buzzing host can extract nectar from a grove of weeping willows on a creek, Thompson said.

"But in Chicago in that week, elms, maples -- many kinds of maples -- alders and other trees are in bloom, in addition to dandelions, other weeds and wildflowers -- maybe 30 good plants," he said.

"And it's nonstop," he added, with different plants coming in to flower throughout the warmer months.

But the population density that produces this constant and copious nectar supply doesn't mean lots of bee stings, said Thompson. He noted that many people mistake honeybees for aggressive yellow-jacket wasps, the unwelcome guest at so many picnics.

Not that honeybees don't sting if provoked, cautioned Thompson, as he lifted a bee-blanketed honeycomb frame out of a hive to show a Chicago Sun-Times photographer and reporter.

"You notice,'' said Thompson, who was not wearing protective gear, that "I'm moving very slowly."