Our neighbors might find their gardens just a bit more fruitful this season, with the placement of honeybee hives on the rooftops at Weavers Way Mercantile and the Weavers Way Chestnut Hill store. 

Each hive is home to approximately 60,000 busy honeybees, all of whom are lucky to live in bee-friendly Northwest Philadelphia, where flowering street trees, front and back yards and an amazing diversity of plants in the Wissahickon provide forage for pollinators from spring through autumn.

Hosting hives is just one way Weavers Way is supporting our local honeybee population. We also support pollinators by promoting native plants at the Mercantile — native plants provide more food to pollinators and other beneficial insects — and by selling the products of local, small-scale beekeeping operations. We’ve got some delicious local honeys for sale, as well as several other products of the hive, including beeswax and pollen. 

Interested in learning more about bees and bee products? Come to a free workshop on Aug. 16. “Bee Healthy: Understanding (and Tasting!) Bee Products” will include tastings of local and varietal bee products, the opportunity to purchase them at a discount and a hands-on project where workshop participants will make a medicinal honey syrup. 

I manage the rooftop hive in Chestnut Hill. It’s one of several locations in the Philadelphia area where I keep bees. The Mt. Airy hive is managed by Sarah Plonski, who also runs a local bee- and wasp-removal service. See her blog at sarahplusbees.com.

In addition to planning workshops and helping manage The Mercantile, Stephanie Bruneau (bruneau@weaversway.coop) is the author of “The Benevolent Bee,” a book about the products of the honeybee hive
(Quarry Books, 2017; thebenevolentbee.com).