Lincoln’s high-rise beehives are getting ready for winter.
More than half of the 60,000 bees on top of the Cornhusker Marriott will soon begin dying, making room for the youngest generation to carry the hives into spring.
Next week, Warren Nelson will make another 10-floor journey to the roof — a trip he’s made nearly weekly since the start of summer — to wrap the hives warmly so the bees can bunker down.
“They’ll stay awake all winter long. And they’ll cluster up into a ball, and the queen will be down in the middle,†he said.
The bees will shiver and quiver, trying to maintain 55 degrees inside the hives while they put their first season as long-term hotel guests behind them. The Cornhusker launched the sideline business — it plans to sell the honey and also use it in pastries — in May, after hosting an artist-in-residence who used beeswax in her paintings.
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It hired Nelson’s Valhalla Bee Farm to help. “It’s been a learning experience,†Nelson said this week. “We’ve not had any bees on top of a building before.â€
But the bees did well, he said. The hives face south, toward the Near South, and thousands of tiny Marriott employees spent the summer buzzing through the neighborhood’s flowerbeds and vegetable gardens.
They didn’t make enough honey for the Cornhusker to start making money, but they could next year — and the years after that. Nelson couldn’t say how much the hives could produce.
“It depends on what’s available for them, how good the nectar flow is,†he said. “Whatever Mother Nature gives them is what they give us.â€
But they did produce about a gallon of honey, which Nelson delivered last week, said Susan Madsen, the hotel’s general manager.
“We each tasted it in a staff meeting and are superexcited,†she said.
They came up with a name for the honey they’ll market: Bee Our Guest.
The first season went well, she said, with one exception. “I wish they were more-accessible to our guests. They are fascinated we have bees on the roof of our hotel.â€
Still, when Madsen sees families in the lobby, she sometimes invites them all the way to the top — to the 10th floor on the elevator, then up a flight of stairs to the roof.
She’s given maybe 50 tours so far, but she’s careful. “I’m very selective of who gets to go up there. There’s no railing or fence.â€
In August, her staff gathered on the roof to watch the solar eclipse, and also to film how the bees behaved when the midday skies darkened.
“They flew in, like it was time to go home.â€