The trend of converting vacant, idle land into community gardens and parks, particularly in major urban areas, has blossomed in recent years into innovative, larger-scale projects such as Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest. One of the next important frontiers is identifying ways to make optimal use of the green potential of working industrial areas, in which heavy industry and functional green space healthily coexist. Airports, which have some of the largest carbon footprints of any industrial or transportation facility, are a prime candidate for these efforts. A new initiative in Seattle called “Flight Path,” utilizing idle airport land to host honey bees, demonstrates one creative approach to this goal.
Flight Path is a joint project between the Port of Seattle, which operates Seattle-Tacoma (“Sea-Tac”) International Airport; the Urban Bee Company, a small Seattle-based producer of local, sustainable honey bee products and services; and The Common Acre, a local non-for-profit that works to “develop, promote, and sustain local economies through the production and presentation of community arts and agricultural projects.” As part of Flight Path, 1,000 acres of land at Sea-Tac Airport—the nation’s fifteenth-busiest—will eventually be utilized to host a population of 500,000 honey bees. Hives for the honeybees are located on what has been idle buffer land around the airport runways, much of it overgrown with invasive plant species. Other scrubland at the airport will be planted with wildflowers from which the bees can collect pollen, and nesting habitat for local species that help pollinate plants. Additionally, an educational display of art and science related to the project will be installed within Sea-Tac’s main passenger terminal in January 2014. An excellent summary of Flight Path and extensive background on this project was recently featured in an article by Robert Mellinger in Crosscut.com ( “Bees on a Plane? Sea-Tac’s honeycomb habitat”).
Flight Path is intended by its organizers to be a model urban agriculture project. The Common Acre and Urban Bee Company aim to develop a naturally raised, chemical free local honeybee stock that can be shared with beekeepers throughout the region, helping to combat the challenges generated by colony collapse. While organizers are seeking funding to complete the project, an eventual goal is for sales of honey produced by the bees to help sustain the project. At present, 16 beehives have been installed at the airport, and the Port of Seattle recently announced that it would designate 50 acres for pollinator habitat. Moreover, incorporating interactive educational displays into the airport terminal guarantees a large captive audience (over 33 million passengers traveled through Sea-Tac in 2012) that will have the opportunity to learn about this project. While Sea-Tac is not the first airport to host honeybees—similar projects have been conducted at airports in Chicago, Dusseldorf and Frankfurt—the considerable buzz around this project could help spur other projects. For example, the St. Louis Airport Authority recently entered into a lease agreement with a local company to host honeybee hives on vacant land at St. Louis’ Lambert Airport.
Image Source: Port of Seattle, by Don Wilson
