There is a big new buzz in San Francisco and it’s coming from the bees. Yes, bees. Seven San Francisco hotels have built hives on their rooftops in an effort to help save the local honeybee population.
The Urban Bee and Herb Garden Project began when the Clift Hotel General Manager Michael Pace was the chairman of the Sustainability Committee for the Hotel Council of San Francisco. In 2015 10 queens and 100,000 bees were brought to the hotel’s rooftop where local bee keeper Roger Garrison arranged the box hives to match the downtown city grid, acting as skyscrapers and even a gold dome to represent City Hall. Garrison tends to six of the hotels’ bee hives.
At the Fairmont San Francisco, bee sanctuaries were not a new concept. In 2008, the brand installed hives in Toronto and Vancouver to help fight Colony Collapse Disorder. Now in San Francisco, the brand has about 250,000 bees that produce about 1,000 pounds of honey each year. Over at the Clift they are on track to have over 70 pounds of honey per hive by this summer and expecting at least 800,000 bees by next year.
What to do with all the honey? The hotels are using it in cocktails, beer, food and spa treatments as well as selling it in gift shops. The Clift’s The Peerless Purple drink includes gin-infused lavender, honey syrup and lavender bitters, and its watermelon salad has lavender-infused honey and goat cheese.
“Since we are chefs in California, we like to use a lot of things that are local,” says the Clift’s chef, Thomas Weibull’s. “Ninety-five percent of our products are local and sustainable.”
Other hotels taking part in the project are the Omni San Francisco, W San Francisco, Hotel Zetta, Marriott Fisherman’s Wharf and the Holiday Inn and Express Fisherman’s Wharf, and two more properties have rooftop sanctuaries in the works.