Atop the roof of one of the buildings on Walgreens’ corporate headquarters campus in Deerfield is a beehive.
Another can be found atop one of the buildings in Skokie’s Illinois Science and Technology Park owned by American Landmark Properties.
They’re part of a growing trend to get honey bees to pollinate flowers in urban and suburban areas and to bring nature closer to people who work and live in towns like Deerfield and Skokie.
“It gives our employees a chance to see, feel and touch nature,” said John Kotlarczyk, Walgreen’s senior director for corporate social responsibility and waste reduction. “They touch and feel sustainability.”
More than a dozen Walgreens employees put honey out of the hive on their fingers and tasted it Sept. 18. Beekeeper Travis Sherlin told them 50,000 bees populate the hive, have a 30-day lifespan, except the queen who can live three years, and one bee produces 1/8 of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.
Sherlin said he expects Walgreens’ honey harvest to be between 40 and 60 pounds. Kotlarczyk said he expects there will be approximately 100 jars to be distributed to employees. Some may be given away.
Sherlin, an urban beekeeper with Alveole, said the Montreal based company maintains beehives at businesses in seven cities. Chicago is the first in the Midwest and there now are 110 sites in the area.
Sherlin said he does all the work once a business agrees to host a hive. The company builds and maintains the hive and even brings the bees.
“We start with a small amount of bees, but they populate very quickly,” Sherlin said.
Sherlin said honeybees fly only within a three-mile radius sipping nectar to pollinate flowers. That highly-local nature means honey made by bees in southwest Deerfield tastes different from those a few miles away in Highland Park or Lake Forest.
Rich Groh, general manager of the Skokie facility, attests to the different taste. Several American Landmark Properties’ sites in both the city and suburbs have hives and there was a tasting in Skokie from various spots.
“There were four or five and they all did taste different,” Groh said. “They were all good, but you could taste the difference.”
Beekeeping is not new at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe. Horticulturalist Lisa Hilgenberg said bees from eight hives pollinate the four-acre Regenstein Fruit and Vegetable Garden there, but pollination is not all about bees.
“All pollinators are important from bees to moths to butterflies to bats,” Hilgenberg said. “They’ve had a loss of habitat because of pesticides. Some are plant-specific like squash bees.”
![An extra-alarm fire destroyed a home and damaged two others on the near West side Wednesday night, though fire officials said no one was injured in the blaze. The fire broke out around 8:30 p.m. on the 1300 block of West 16th Street in the Pilsen neighborhood, according to a social media update from the Chicago Fire Department. Officials quickly upgraded the blaze to a 2-11 fire. Neighbors who clustered around the scene Wednesday night said the home had been under construction and appeared to be vacant. Although the fire was declared struck out at 9:30 p.m. in a social […]](https://www.chicagotribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/ctc-l-structure-fire-041724-06.jpg?w=525 "An extra-alarm fire destroyed a home and damaged two others on the near West side Wednesday night, though fire officials said no one was injured in the blaze. The fire broke out around 8:30 p.m. on the 1300 block of West 16th Street in the Pilsen neighborhood, according to a social media update from the Chicago Fire Department. Officials quickly upgraded the blaze to a 2-11 fire. Neighbors who clustered around the scene Wednesday night said the home had been under construction and appeared to be vacant. Although the fire was declared struck out at 9:30 p.m. in a social […]")
