IT’S THE PLACE TO BEE
West Queen West BIA, landscaper construct ‘hotels’ for helpful pollinators in bizzy area,
Business owners on Queen St. W. are taking the sting out of drab urban living with a new project to make Toronto’s concrete jungle a bit more bee-friendly. The West Queen West Business Improvement Area (BIA) has partnered with a landscape company to build birdhouse-style homes for helpful pollinators in one of the city’s busiest neighbourhoods.
“They’re Bee Hotels. It’s just so cool,” said BIA Executive Director Rob Sysak, who’s been droning on with bee-related wordplay for days.
“It’s bee-utiful. It’s un-bee-lievable. I’m probably driving everyone around me crazy but I haven’t stopped.”
In 2016, Toronto was declared Canada’s first “bee city” by an organization of experts and community members known as Bee City Canada.
Applied for with the approval of city council, the title signalled a commitment to protect endangered bee populations. The West Queen West BIA responded with the Pollinator Paradise project, working with streetscaping experts Restorative Landscapes to grow bee-friendly flowers and edible and medicinal plants in more than 70 concrete planters along Queen St. W.
This year, Bee Hotels mounted on rustic-looking 2.5-metre birch frames were added to six of the planters between Bathurst St. and Gladstone Ave.
“The hotels are made of reclaimed wood, using pallets we’ve taken from the neighbourhood,” said Restorative Landscapes owner Jake Harding, who designed the hotels with help from a local artist. “We filled them with a mix of birch, cedar and hollow canes from various things like sunchokes and hollow grasses.”
The crevices in and around the stalks and logs are ideal for many types of so-called “solitary bees” — ones that don’t make honey or live in a hive with a colony.
There are dozens of solitary bees native to Ontario, Harding said.
“All the concrete and lack of habitat and lack of food for them is part of the reason that they’re endangered. By adding some more of these crops and some sort of refuge for them among the concrete, we’ll hopefully attract more of them back.”
Cassandra Vervoort can see one of the bee hotels from her spot behind the counter at Aesop skin care shop, just west of Trinity Bellwoods Park.
She, like many people who work along Queen St. W., said she was un- aware of the project.
But she welcomed the new additions to the neighbourhood.
The more natural elements that can be incorporated into the city, the more people might begin to think about nature and the environment, and that’s important, Vervoort said.
Staff at Type Books, a short flight from three of the Bee Hotels, had not heard about the project either. Local bees are gaining pied-à-terres in a hot neighbourhood, but local humans will benefit too.
“They’re actually really important to our food supply,” Harding said. “There are a bunch of people growing stuff just around the core of the city and any fruiting crop requires pollination.”
What’s more, the edible and medicinal plants in the BIA’s planters are up for grabs for locals looking for a snack or herbal remedy.
The planters — the majority of which are painted with bright designs and socially conscious messages — are flush with foliage, adding a burst of colour to the grey and dusty street.