Our bee fleet

More than 30,000 of these small, striped insects are flying in Hamburg for Hapag-Lloyd. They produce genuine Hanseatic honey, and play an important role in our ecosystem. To mark World Bee Day on 20 May, we visited our buzzing colleagues in their homes above the rooftops of Hamburg.

The figures are impressive: 20 million pollinated flowers per day, 5 million kilometres flown per year, and an expected yield of 20 to 30 kilograms of honey. Hapag-Lloyd bees are hard-working in the truest sense of the word. At the beginning of April, we set up a colony of bees on the roof of our administration building on Rosenstrasse in Hamburg together with our partner Bee-Rent. “With the bees, we want to contribute to the preservation of biological diversity in urban areas and help to stabilise the bee population in Germany as a whole,” says Samuel Stüber from the Corporate Communications department, in explaining Hapag-Lloyd’s engagement. Stüber works together with the beekeeper Michael Röper to make sure that the bees have all the food and care they need.

The city: a paradise for bees
And the small production animals visibly feel at home in the hustle and bustle of the big city. This may sound contradictory at first, but there are good reasons for it. Monocultures, the use of pesticides in agriculture, and the Varroa mite have afflicted bee colonies worldwide. In contrast, in the green spaces, gardens and parks of cities, the bees find a wide range of uncontaminated plant and flower species. So the collecting bees swarm out every day to gather the nectar that will later become honey.

Bee industriousness is worth big bucks
At the same time, the bees help ensure that our supermarket shelves are full. Indeed, without bees, the fruit and vegetable section would mainly be one thing: empty. Around 80 percent of all cultivated and wild plants are pollinated by honey bees, making the small flyers the third most important production animal in the world after cattle and pigs. Experts estimate that the pollination efforts of bees result in a global economic benefit worth €153 billion. So beekeepers and beekeeping are about much more than just honey production.

First Hapag-Lloyd honey in the late summer
Nevertheless, the honey harvest is still the highlight for the beekeeper. But we’ll have to wait a bit longer before the sticky-sweet substance flows into Hapag-Lloyd-branded honey jars, as the combs will only be removed in two to three months. “We’re very curious to see how much and what kind of honey our bees will deliver to us,” Stüber says, looking forward to late summer. “We’ll only be able to tell after the harvest, and the first time is always a surprise!”