This Amarkaner Life: Bee Curious

“I mean, I came home after that first meeting, completely enthusiastic about this possibility, and I went to my wife there and she was pregnant with our second child, and I said, I've decided what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna become a beekeeper. And she was absolutely horrified. And she was like, what about our summer holidays? And I was like, well, we could be like farmers. She was like, that’s gonna be a nightmare with small children and our expectations for living in the city.”

MUSIC

Hello and welcome to episode three of This Amarkaner Life — Archipelago’s all-new season of stories from and about the island of Amager in southern Copenhagen.

I’m your host, James Clasper, and I’ve gotta be honest, I’m hoping for a bit of buzz around this episode.

“As soon as you start working with bees, you realise that honey is absolutely magical. It's just phenomenal that you put these creatures out around the city and then over a few days and weeks and months, gradually it accumulates this absolute treasure ”

That’s right — because in this episode, the Amarkaners in question are the island’s hard-working honey bees.

And to find out all about them, I visited a remarkable organisation based in Amager’s historic Sundholm district.

BELL RINGS, OLIVER MAXWELL GREETS VISITORS

“My name's Oliver Maxwell and I founded the Bybi Project. I am British but moved to Denmark fifteen years ago and have been here ever since. Bybi means “city bee" in Danish. So by is by, a city, and bi is a bee. What we're looking to do in Bybi is to really take this question of how we are together with nature in the time that we’re living and in the future that we’re looking into. So for us, we’re not honey producers, but we’re a community of bees and flowers and people, and what we’re interested in is what can we do together so that that community thrives.”

Bybi’s story begins on a bleak midwinter night in 2009, shortly after Oliver left his job in the social enterprise sector.

"So I was cycling on my way to a Christmas party in Islands Brygge, and I was going over Slusen, down at Sydhaven, and at that time you could kind of wriggle through a path and there was an old water pumping house or something, and then there were these 15 or 20 polystyrene boxes behind a fence with a name on the fence, and I saw them there and, you know, it was December, it was cold, there were bits of wet newspaper blowing around, and I just saw these boxes now. I was just intrigued. were they, what lived there? What was kind of sheltering inside the box through the winter.”

Inside the polystyrene boxes, of course, were hundreds of sleeping honey bees. Oliver was intrigued.

“On the fence there was a telephone number of the beekeeper. And I gave him a call and went for a coffee and he was a lovely Argentinian immigrant who'd had bees back in Argentina and was now kind of keeping bees around the city. And we had a cup of coffee and I just kind of discovered this absolutely fascinating world of urban beekeepers in Copenhagen. But in particular what I was interested in was honey and bees as a way of bringing different cultures together. So I saw it as an opportunity to bring a kind of status and visibility — partly to myself as an immigrant in the country, but also as a way of actually bringing something for other refugees, immigrants, multicultural influences that I’ve always felt have been a little bit lacking in Denmark.”

“I’m an anthropologist originally, so my interest has always been in this relationship between people — people and each other, people and the environment that we share with other species, animals and plants.”

“My thought was actually from the start, not just around making the money, but how to make it into a project that was bigger than that. So the first thing I did was actually to contact organizations that I thought that we could partner with. Then I was really lucky to meet a professional beekeeper who is just moving to Copenhagen and was interested in helping support and helping look after the bees. So it kind of fell together at the start, with a combination of different organizations that wanted to join, this place that we're in now that offered me a location, a room to work in, and then a professional beekeeper that was able to actually help us decide what equipment we needed, what kind of bees we needed, show us how to use it, and start looking after them in a way that actually, you know, was professional and safe.”

As Oliver says, one of the pieces that fell into place for Bybi was finding a home in Sundholm, a neighbourhood established over a century ago as a place for the city to send its beggars, vagrants and other down-and-outs. 

“The Sundholm estate was built as a workhouse, about a hundred years ago, about 1910 — so a combination between a prison, a hospital, and a factory.”

“The idea was, it was this part of this huge modernisation project of Denmark where poor people who didn’t fit into society should be trained how to work and how to participate in society through hard work and disciplined practice. It’s still run by the municipality. It's still the same sorts of people who are here. It's a little bit more free than it was then. So people can come and go as they please. But in essence, our society's attitude hasn't actually changed that much. We still are very fixed on this idea of work being the only way in which people can achieve a respectful position in society and the result actually when you’re on the ground is a bit more interesting because it’s a place where it's quite a lot of conflict around this and different forms of resistance. So it’s a place where the rules meet the reality of life and a lot of compromises are made and a lot of ways of living together have to be negotiated. That’s what I think is fascinating, and slipping between those cracks is pretty much where we are.

“The changes that we need to see in our society are gonna grow out of those cracks. So, rather than trying to ignore them, trying to understand them and see what kind of weeds and forms of life are splitting them apart and growing out of them is what I think is fascinating about being here.”

Oliver has sought to ensure that people from different social and professional backgrounds and living conditions have contributed to Bybi. Today it has a handful of employees, many volunteers and a network of partners who contribute both practically and financially.

And through various events and experiences, Bybi strives to teach people about bees and their relationship with the city's flowers and human population.

SOUND OF START OF CROCUS CEREMONY

Not that long ago, in fact, I joined a group of American exchange students who were visiting Bybi as part of a class on sustainable design. 

Their tour ended with an unusual ceremony involving crocus bulbs.

SOUNDS OF CROCUS CEREMONY

“As soon as you start working with bees, you realise that honey is absolutely magical. It's just phenomenal that you put these creatures out around the city and then over a few days and weeks and months, then gradually it accumulates this absolute treasure. And we have projects all over the city. Some of them with municipal organizations that we have — for example, the roof of the city hall. We have a great relationship with the guards in there who know us now. So we kind of come in, let ourselves in through the back stairs, up the kitchen, past the mayor's office, up a ladder onto the roof, and we've got two or three hives that sit up there and produce honey.”

"We have projects like the Tivoli Gardens, where there's honey being produced. We work with big companies and conference centres like Bella Center down the road. They were one of the first. Companies like Ørsted Energy, Ikea. We have projects with a couple of housing associations working with long-term unemployed and disadvantaged peoples, where we've been training them to look after bees. Altogether, we’ve got about 25 different sites around the city. Each one is different. Each place has a different way of working with the project. Sometimes it’s the director who’s taken an interest. Sometimes it’s the lady who makes the tea. But what tends to happen is that in each project an identity attached itself to the bees. They become the bees of that place and we’re connected to them. So this honey becomes a sort of gift, an invitation, something that has much more meaning than just honey because it comes from the place where it is and because it’s connected to these other social networks and animal networks, plant networks around the community that they're based in.”

This is, of course, a podcast series about Amager — and there’s a question hanging over this episode like a honey bee hovering over a hydrangea. Where exactly are Amager’s bees?

“Well, we’ve got several projects in Amager, four or five different areas. Some of them are very interested in the kolonihaver, the allotment gardens and the villas down in the southern part. So the ones at Bella Center, for example — you’d have thought they're going to the common, but they don't, they actually fly the other direction mostly. We have a nice little project in the forest right underneath the runway for Copenhagen where they fly around and they make a really fabulous honey from that area. We have projects near the clover fields in the north. People are playing football there, but it's one of the last areas where there's kind of scrubland. It’s a project where there are strange containers and migrant workers and odd little companies doing obscure things with special effects and they fly around there.”

"The bees themselves — well, they are honey bees. They are honey bees that we’ve brought into the city with the purpose of making honey. And what’s important for us in all of our projects is that each colony, each bee, each spoonful of honey needs to be connected to a broader story about the plants and animals and people that are in that area, of all different kinds. So equally important for us is how we cultivate little wild spaces, how we plant flowers, how we can influence each other to enrich the flower beds, the sides of the roads, the rooftops, the minds of the people who live in Amager.”

One way to enrich minds is through honey, of course. So I had to ask — is there a particular Amager honey that locals should try to get a hold of?

“Well, we have this fermented honey that comes from the forest in Kongelund, and that’s something we made completely by mistake. It tends to be a bit more humid down there, so we obviously did it on a day when it was maybe a bit too humid or it wasn’t quite ready at the same time as other places. And it was sitting in the bucket for a few months and then it gradually and slowly began to ferment, and normally beekeepers would throw it away because, I think, in particular, honey from rapeseed tends to be quite bitter and sour when it's fermented. But this has an absolutely extraordinary flavour. It's a kind of strangely champagne-like taste, some of it. And we kept it and every now and again we show it to famous chefs from some of the best restaurants in Copenhagen, and they absolutely fall over backwards. They’re, like, wow, this is just incredible. Like, you can't make this stuff deliberately, it can only come as an accident of nature.”

SOUND OF STUDENTS TASTING 

As part of their tour, the American students got to taste much of Bybi’s honey — and buy pots of their favourite. Indeed, selling honey is a big part of Bybi’s business model. But in truth, it has a much greater purpose — one that began with a reconsideration of the very language it uses.

“What we realised after doing this for a few years was that this wasn't about being honey producers. This was about a community that is more than human — of animals, plants and people, of bees and flowers and people, and about how we could develop things that would make that community thrive. Once we realised that, we realised that the language we use around business just doesn't make sense. The language we use around talking to nature doesn't make sense. It's putting us in the wrong direction. Calling honey a product is almost insulting to what it can actually do. We refer to it as an invitation because we like to see honey as having an agency of its own. It wants something, it wants us to do something. I hate this idea of a consumer. You know, our whole society tends to think that humans are predictable robots who as long as you identify their characteristics, then they'll do what you tell them to do. I don't think that's the case. I think anyone from two years old to 120 years old is capable of making intelligent, emotionally guided responsible decisions about their lives and their behaviour and that that is what we need to exploit. The conventions about how we run a business in terms of creating a product, creating a volume, creating economies of scale, identifying a supply and demand and so on, those are things that are made up. They’re not any rule of nature, any particular way of doing things. They’re stuff that has emerged in the last couple of hundred years as a convention of doing things that has one purpose and that is to accumulate capital and money,  at the expense of other species in our area. Finding an alternative to that, an alternative language, is so important, and we need to do that on every scale that we can.”

“There’s a lot of talk at the moment about regeneration, and regeneration is something that I find really inspiring. Regeneration is beyond sustainability. So the idea is that we humans have as much potential to do good for the living world as we have to destroy it, and we need to facilitate the emergence of that potential in ourselves, in each other, in other species regeneration often is put out in the countryside in terms of agriculture, and it's all about soil health, the soil community, talk about the bacteria and worms and so on, how they can support each other to create a healthy soil. I think that when we take that idea into an urban context and see our urban cities as living systems, then we can actually be inspired by what's happening down in the soil in our relationships here. The city is also a living system. It's also got trees and plants and people and animals and insects, and we can regenerate those relationships just as successfully and vitally as we can a spoonful of soil in the countryside.”

Heady stuff, maybe — but as Oliver says, anyone can get involved and help play a regenerative role. And you never know, it might even change the way you experience the city.

“Bybi is a community and it's an open-ended community with no centre or no real edge. So, I mean, plant a flower, notice the bees and other insects in your front garden on your way to work, in the playground when you're playing with the kids. Taste the honey, share it. Be curious about the other species that we share our city with.”

“Bees are just one of the kind of species that we share the city with, that we become companions with. If you begin to look around, you see that the city is full of these encounters between humans or animals that are absolutely magical and can tell us a lot about how we can live in the future. It might be the swarms of jellyfish that kind of slowly pump down the canal towards the autumn and winter. It might be this magical explosion of flowers from linden trees that happens during a few days at the end of June, which is, you know, a traditional moment in north European culture for tens of thousands of years. It might be the return of the swifts that we all suddenly notice in the middle of May when suddenly they’re back. They know the city better than we do. They come back to the same street and fly all the way to North Africa and back again. There are these moments where we can recognize the magic of those stories and then weave them into a way of living in the city that I think gives us the possibility of creating more space in the city, but also the emotional tools we need to be able to engage with what’s happening in the rest of the world.”

MUSIC

You’ve been listening to episode three of This Amarkaner Life, a new season of Archipelago all about the island of Amager.

If you’ve enjoyed listening to it, feel free to share the episode with friends and family or leave a nice review wherever you get your podcasts.

The music in this episode is by two artists: Scenery and Squares and Triangles.

You can find links to their music in the show notes, along with more information about Bybi.

Many thanks for listening — I’ll, uh, "bee" back with a brand-new episode very soon.