Corporate Beekeeping Services & Pollinator Programs
Learn about the turnkey Corporate Beekeeping and Pollinator Habitat Programs that The Best Bees Company offers to corporate and non-profit clients in more than 20 metropolitan areas across the country, how these programs will benefit your organization, and how our Corporate Beekeeping and Pollinator Habitat Programs can help you optimize your ESG investment.
What are Corporate Beekeeping and Pollinator Habitat Programs?
Corporate Beekeeping and Pollinator Habitat Programs are innovative ways for companies and non-profit organizations to demonstrate their commitment to environmental action, social justice, and good governance (ESG). These programs include beehives and support for pollinator-friendly gardens on rooftops or on the grounds of office buildings.
Industries & Clients We Serve
We provide beekeeping services to over 500+ hives for our corporate clients in a range of industries, including Commercial and Residential Property Management, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Consumer Products, Education, Hospitality and Retail.
Biodiversity & Sustainability with Best Bees
As leading companies and non-profits invest more time and resources in ESG, they are learning that there’s a strong link between biodiversity and sustainability. The relationship between the two is simple: biodiversity creates a virtuous circle, where the more species that exist in an ecosystem, the healthier the environment.
Pollinator diversity is critical to this biodiverse virtuous circle: a wide variety of pollinators means that more species of plants can be pollinated; greater plant diversity supports all forms of life, including animals, fungi and bacteria.
How Pollinator Programs Support Biodiversity
Long established in North America, honeybees work in tandem with native pollinators to pollinate not only the fruit and vegetable crops that feed us, but a host of native plant species that are the backbone of local ecosystems. Increasing the number of pollinators improves biodiversity, which supports healthier food systems that offer nutritional diversity and security.
To establish biodiverse pollinator programs, organizations turn to Ecosystem Service partners like The Best Bees Company, who offer easy to install/easy to maintain, turnkey solutions that have significant, visible impact and engage & educate stakeholders.
The Benefits to Hosting Beehives on your Commercial Property
At the center of most Corporate Pollinator Programs are beehives, as honeybees are the leading pollinator of flowering plants and are pollinator “generalists” meaning that they pollinate a wide variety of species versus many native pollinator species.
Our Regions
We service properties within a ~90 minute radius from these city centers:
Looking for another city? Help us put more bees on the map.
Corporate Beekeeping Program Offerings
Our basic corporate program includes hive installation, monthly hive management by our beekeepers, monthly reports on your hives’ health, and jarred honey harvested from your hives.
- Our team will evaluate your site and identify the optimal, safe placement for hives.
- Hand-crafted, all-natural equipment will be installed onsite, and colonies of docile honeybees will be introduced into each hive.
- We offer consultation on best plants for pollinators in ground-level landscaping and roof-top gardens.
- Our beekeepers will visit your hives for monthly maintenance visits with advanced scheduling so you can alert your team.
- You’ll receive reports on the health of your hives after each beekeeper visit.
- Our full-time customer service team will be available to you by phone or email.
- We’ll harvest, process and bottle surplus honey for you.
- Replacement colonies, if needed, will be provided at no cost.
With our professional beekeepers handling all aspects of hive installation and maintenance, all you must do is promote your beekeeping program to stakeholders to get maximum return on your investment. Our client service staff can share with you how other clients in your industry have used beekeeping to promote their ESG efforts, and ways they’ve successfully engaged stakeholders.
Corporate Educational Workshops and Communication Programs
- We can arrange meet-your-beekeeper sessions, including in-person or virtual tours of a beehive.
- We can help you plan and run workshops focused on the role of pollinators in creating green cities/health urban ecosystems.
- Our founder, Dr. Noah Wilson-Rich, can speak on pollinator issues at events you host.
- We have a wealth of studies, white papers and reports on pollinators and their role in building healthy urban environments you can use in promoting your sustainability efforts.
- We can install custom-designed hives in your corporate colors, with your logo
- Gift-quality honey can be bottled for you using honey from your own hives, in jars with custom branded labels.
- We can help you plan and orchestrate innovative sustainability events, including honey tastings, queen naming contests and receptions using honey infused foods and beverages.
HoneyDNA Analysis
Our HoneyDNA analysis service is based on a process we pioneered that uses advanced genomic sequencing to identify the exact percentage of species foraged to produce your hives’ honey.
Based on analysis of samples taken, we provide you with a report detailing the various species of flowering trees, shrubs and plants your bees have visited, and the contribution of each.
Understanding where your bees foraged reveals which plants best feed pollinators in your local environment and can inform what you should plant on your property to provide nourishment for them throughout the season.
Clients who avail themselves of this service tell us that the data they receive provides a fascinating look into the local environment for their stakeholders and encourages them to support their company’s beekeeping programs and to take action to support pollinators in their homes and their communities.
Are Bees Safe?
Best Bees’ hives are stocked with Apis mellifera ligustica. Bred for passivity, they’re considered to be the most docile species of honeybee.
Our beekeepers have extensive experience working in densely populated areas in and around Boston, and are experts at safe hive placement on rooftops, balconies, and ground-level gardens. They’ll work with you to site your hives in visible, low-traffic areas, where you can safely enjoy observing your bees as they come and go, pollinating nearby trees, bushes, and plants.
We situate our hives in safe locations, secured from animal intrusion and weather damage.
Our beehives and beekeepers are fully insured for personal liability and damage. We can provide you with a certificate of insurance (COI) if needed.
Types of Locations/Placements for Hives
Servicing beehives requires a surprisingly small amount of space. At 16” x 22” x 40”, hives take up a little more than eight cubic feet—about the size of a small office refrigerator—and our beekeepers need only 3 to 5 feet of clearance on either side for the access they need to service each hive.
This means that beehives can be installed almost anywhere you’d like, such as rooftops, courtyards, garden-level spaces, and throughout your facility grounds.
While most of our clients want their hives installed in prominent places where employees, tenants or guests can see them, some prefer to install them where they’re out of sight. We can work with your facility management team to install your hives in locations that are safely out of high traffic areas, in environments that are right for both you and your bees.
Why partner with Best Bees?
Like your organization, Best Bees is passionate about the environment, and is dedicated to realizing a vision of a sustainable future with healthy, green cities. We may have started as a beekeeping company 12 years ago but given the breadth of our vision and ESG engagement, Ecosystem Company better describes the scope of our work.
We’re more than the leading beekeeping service in North America, we operate on science-first principles, treating every hive we manage as a datapoint, and every hive as an opportunity to advance bee science.
Through observation of thousands of hives under our care and collaboration with our scientific partners like MIT, NASA and the Urban Bee Lab, we field tests of new treatments, read the results, and share our findings with the scientific community, the beekeeping community, and the public.
We hope the result of this on-going scientific learning process will be new and more effective best practices and a steady improvement in the health of the world’s bees and native pollinators.
Best Bees is a young, innovative firm, founded by entrepreneurs from the science and technology fields.
We’re proud to be a diverse company, employing many people of color and people from the LGBTQ+ community. We’re a Certified LGBT Business Enterprise®.
Frequently Asked Questions
We provide you with a report on each hive, after every beekeeping visit. These reports include statistics on hive size and health, quantity of honey stores, and the presence of pests and pathogens. If you take advantage of our DNA analysis service, we will provide you with a detailed analysis of the different plant species your bees are pollinating, and the amount each contributes to your honey. The reports, and aggregate learnings across all of our hives, are testament to your commitment to promoting biodiversity and improving the health of the environment.
We stock our hives with Apis mellifera ligustica, a species of honeybee bred for docility, place them in low-traffic areas and service them with highly trained, locally certified professional beekeepers. Our beehives and beekeepers are fully insured for personal liability and damage. We can provide you with a certificate of insurance (COI) if needed.
It’s not essential that forage be immediately available to your bees, as they can travel as much as four miles to find food and water. That said, local sources of nourishment require less energy consumption for bees and make for healthier hives. Most of our clients add pollinator gardens, and rethink their landscaping, once their bees are established and have become an integral part of their corporate family. Pollinator gardens and pollinator friendly landscaping help to beautify your property, provide oases of calming nature for employees and tenants, and can improve your building’s LEED certification rating.
We have over 500+ corporate clients, representing such industry leaders as Beacon Capital Partners, JLL, Four Seasons Hotels, Boston College, JPMorgan Chase, L’Oreal, and Whole Foods.
There are many creative ways we can work together to engage your stakeholders in beekeeping, and through beekeeping, in your company’s ESG initiatives. These include programs such as educational workshops, virtual hive tours, meet-your-beekeeper sessions, keynote speakers, branded hives, signs & honey, as well as events that feature pollinators and honey-based foods and beverages.
Beehives take up very little space—about 8 square feet, and require a footprint of no more than 16” x 22” x 40”
Hives can be installed in any low-traffic area, including rooftops, courtyards, gardens areas, and landscaped grounds. For healthier colonies, we usually place hives where they will get some morning sun, and be protected from high winds. All hive placements will comply with state and municipal requirements. For more information, read our hive placement informational guide.
