Urban beekeeping is on the rise in and around Toronto. Despite global reports of declining bee populations, urban bees are thriving and important parts of city ecosystems. The beekeepers themselves are an eclectic and diverse group of people, and for one Toronto artist, their calm and respectful relationship with the buzzing insects became the subject of her work.

Kuldip Jassal

“Could you move over a bit, you’re standing in the bee’s landing path,” said Kuldip Jassal as we stood on the roof of his garage near Bloor St. W. and Lansdowne Ave.

Jassal was doing an examination of one of his two hives, extracting the bee-covered frames one by one, pointing out which of the compartments contained honey he would eventually harvest.

We were dressed in beekeeping suits, but Jassal gently dislodged each frame and pulled them out with bare hands, the bees crawling over his skin, but neither them or Jassal were agitated.

“Listen,” he said, motioning me to lean in to the open hive. The sound of hundreds of buzzing bees is incredibly rich, like a factory where all the machines are in harmony.

The heat from inside the hive was just as intense and Jassal explained the bees generate enough heat to keep the hive’s temperature in the mid 30s. Most surprising is how calm and almost soothing opening a hive is. The sound, the slow movements; it’s the opposite of what one might expect.

He’s part of a growing movement of urban beekeepers in Toronto and around the world who tuck apiaries into cities, often just out of view of most people. Jassal keeps hives in a number of locations around Toronto including a property near Bayview Ave. and Hwy. 401, where he has painted hives that were done as an art project by students at Bishop Marrocco High School at Dundas and Bloor Sts., where he had given workshops on urban beekeeping.

Brian Hamlin

“Beekeeping is very interpretive,” says Brian Hamlin at his stall at the East Lynn Park Farmers Market on The Danforth. “Everybody does it a bit differently.”

Hamlin has been keeping bees since 1975, and in 2005 expanded to an urban setting with hives on the Toronto Island. Today he sells honey and beeswax candles with raw material harvested from apiaries at the Port Lands Energy Centre and on various University of Toronto rooftops, including New College near Spadina Ave. and College St. and at the Mississauga campus.

Though it sounds counterintuitive, Hamlin explains that urban bees do better than rural ones because agricultural practices have resulted in monocrops, limiting the variety of pollens a bee can collect, while pesticides have also decimated many colonies.

In cities the variety of plant life is quite diverse so urban areas are smorgasbords for bees, and honey will take on the taste of the surrounding vegetation bees visit.

Diane Borsanto

“I became interested in learning more about bees and practicing as a beekeeper after tasting diverse honey samples,” says Toronto artist Diane Borsato. “There’s pine honey, orange blossom honey, chestnut honey, wildflower honey, eucalyptus honey, and each expresses the relationship of the bees to a particular landscape.”

In 2013, Borsato exhibited a series of “Apiary Videos” at the AGO, where she filmed urban beekeepers in a meditative state with their hives, including both Jassal, Hamlin and members of various other Toronto beekeeper groups. She also began maintaining two hives with her father on the banks of the Credit River in Mississauga.

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“They are awe-inspiring, a little threatening, and it’s a privilege to move among thousands of stinging insects, to peer into their world,” says Borsato. “It also occurred to me that beekeepers have a special set of skills and knowledge; they know how to be calm, and to move slowly and mindfully.”

Urban hives are good for the city’s ecosystem, but they are also unexpected oases of calm in the urban bustle. And the honey? It might be the closest we can get to actually tasting the city itself