First own honey
On June 3rd, 2019, two isolated queen bees were placed into a “bee box” at the Olympiastadion Berlin. In a natural meadow on the großer Marchhof, around 100 meters from the stadium, 2 bee colonies, consisting of approximately 40.000 honeybees, found their new home. A year later, after getting used to their new environment, the honey of our stadium bees can be harvested for the first time.
After the bees were placed into their new home last summer, they settled in excellently and easily survived the winter with their own produced honey. In spring this year, they diligently began to build new honeycombs and continued to produce honey. This made it possible, that we were able to remove the first few frames with well-filled honeycombs from the bee boxes last week. These will now be flung and will result in around 6 kg of our first own Olympiastadion Berlin honey. We only removed so much that the bees can survive the next winter on their own and without honey substitutes.
A bee visits around 100 flowers before flying back to the beehive with approx. 45 mg nectar and handing it over to the hive bee. By passing the nectar from one bee to the next, enzymes and riptides get mixed into the nectar. It then gets fanned by the bees to achieve a water content of less than 18%. The honey is then placed into a cell and sealed with wax.
Every year during midsummer the honey can be harvested. We are already excited to see how much honey our busy bees will produce by next year.
Establishing bee colonies is one of numerous sustainability projects of Olympiastadion Berlin GmbH. Further examples: all green areas of the stadium are watered with rainwater thanks to the use of a rainwater tank. With the help of an absorption chiller, district heat is used for refrigeration and then to cool the server rooms. Due to its efforts in sustainability, and the successful sustainability strategy, the Olympiastadion Berlin was the first stadium in the world to have received Green Globe certification in 2018. The hard work will continue with the “climate neutral stadium” project: projects such as a photovoltaic system, heat recovery systems in the ventilation systems and more electric charging stations are already being planned.