Hard-working bees, honey-sweet harvest!

In April 2019, we set up a colony of bees on the roof of our administration building on Hamburg’s Rosenstrasse. It has been a genuine win-win situation: While the bees help the surrounding natural environment in their role as pollinators, they also bring smiles to our faces with their Hanseatic honey. This year’s harvest was particularly plentiful.

Hapag-Lloyd’s fleet of bees has produced a whopping 27 kilograms of honey this year – or almost 10 kilograms more than in 2019! In cooperation with the company Bee-Rent, we have deployed more than 30,000 “winged workers” since last year. At present, the honey is being centrifuged, sieved, stirred and poured into small jars.

Our bees swarm out of their colony day after day and cover almost the entire city centre of Hamburg, which is home to parks, gardens and green spaces containing an amazing number of plants and flowers. The bees stop at them to gather the nectar that will later become honey. By the way, they almost exclusively fly to yellow and blue flowers, as they cannot recognise the colour red.

For every kilogram of honey, the members of our bee colony collectively travel approximately 240,000 kilometres – the equivalent of six times around the world. On the average day, our bee fleet pollinates roughly 20 million blossoms, thereby playing an enormously important role in addition to producing honey. After all, a large part of the agricultural yields when growing plants, flowers and fruits is reliant on pollination by bees. So we can be doubly proud of our flying fleet!