Downtown Detroit's newest sweet spot: Beehives installed on rooftop

Downtown Detroit just got about 10,000 new residents on Thursday, and they’re quite literally making the city buzz.

The nonprofit conservation group Bees in the D installed one of six planned rooftop hives Thursday on top of the former Detroit News building at 615 W. Lafayette Street, now owned by Bedrock.

“There’s a lot of urban gardens and bees really help with the pollination,” Bees in the D co-founder Brian Peterson-Roest said before the installation.

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Bees in the D’s mission, according to its website, is to promote conservation through education and build a network of beehives in Detroit and southeast Michigan. The group is contracted out by Bedrock, which hired it to run the program and take care of the hives, Bedrock spokeswoman Sam West said in an e-mail.

Bedrock plans to use the honey produced by the bees at the Press Room Café at ground level of 615 Lafayette, West said.

The idea behind the initiative is to create a “Detroit bee highway,” with hives and “way stations” where they can stop throughout metro Detroit, said Peterson-Roest, a fifth-grade teacher at Musson Elementary School in Rochester and an adjunct professor at Oakland University.

Peterson-Roest, 43, who founded Bees in the D with his husband, Brian Roest-Peterson, 45, said bees are “very misunderstood” and tend to get blamed for the defensive behavior of other species, such as wasps and hornets.

“And so I’m hoping that the general public will start to realize that honeybees, we can coexist with them,” Peterson-Roest said.

The hives at 615 W. Lafayette are part of a larger urban beekeeping movement in Detroit and around the world, with groups like Detroit Hives buying vacant lots in the city and getting socially conscious companies to sponsor the hives. 

Bees are essential to the environment because of their roles as pollinators. 

"Without that pollination, a lot of times the blossoms will just fall off and then you won't have a fruit," Peterson-Roest said. "So with Detroit being such a strong city with urban gardens, this really helps the urban gardens flourish."

Peterson-Roest said that by midsummer the rooftop hives will grow to about 60,000 bees each.

The rooftop location for Thursday's installation faces Fort Street and was selected because of a guard wall that acts as a windbreak and because it faces due south.

“They like the sun in their front door,” said Peterson-Roest.

One more hive will be installed on the Fort Street side of the roof, and Peterson-Roest said they plan to put four more hives on the other side of the roof. Other downtown Detroit hive locations include the Cobo Center roof and the Detroit Foundation Hotel. They have 84 confirmed hives at a total of 33 locations.

Peterson-Roest said he “caught the bug” about 10 years ago when he attended a two-week crash course in beekeeping at Beaver Island.

“I really feel I need to be a voice for the bees because they obviously can’t speak for themselves,” Peterson-Roest said. “They’ve been very good to me and so I want to be good to them back. So I’m trying to be a voice for them to help us human beings realize that we can coexist and that we can work toward greater sustainability.”

Contact Hasan Dudar: hdudar@freepress.com.