Rooftop Hives

Nester Finn is proud to partner with Alvéole to install responsible rooftop beehives to our roofs in order to bring nature closer to our community while supporting local biodiversity. Alvéole is an urban beekeeping company that brings bees to city buildings across North America and Europe, giving the people who live, work and stay in them a closer connection to the nature around them.

Every three weeks during the season, an Alvéole beekeeper visits the hive, cares for the colony and shares what the bees have been up to. Meanwhile, the bees fly up to 5 km across the city, visiting nearby trees, parks and gardens. By late summer, that journey turns into honey that tastes like the neighbourhood it came from.

Alvéole’s beekeepers use the hive as a starting point to talk about the thousands of wild bee species that share our cities, and about the small things anyone can do to help them, like planting native flowers. Alvéole also installs wild bee homes, which give local solitary bees a place to nest. The goal goes beyond keeping bees: it’s to help people notice the nature already living around them and want to help it thrive.

We’ve just installed our first hive at West Queen West in Toronto. Stay tuned for our honey harvest, which will become a limited edition perk for some of our guests, as well as hive installations at our properties in Montréal and New York.

One busy queen: In peak season, a queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day. That’s more than her own body weight.

It can get cramped: A healthy hive can hold tens of thousands of bees in summer, all working for one queen.

Big commute: Hive bees forage up to 5 km from home, covering parks, gardens and street trees across the neighbourhood.

Built-in heating: Bees keep the centre of the hive at about 35°C. In winter they huddle together and shiver their flight muscles to stay warm until spring.

A team effort: A honey bee makes about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime, so every jar of Alvéole honey is the work of thousands of bees.

Hyper-local honey: Because bees forage close to home, every Alvéole hive makes its own honey. Its colour and flavour depend on what’s blooming nearby, so two buildings in the same city can produce completely different honey.