City Hall’s newest workers are industrious, team-minded, boundlessly loyal to their leader.

They’re also small, fuzzy and black or gold.

A beekeeper installed two beehives containing 20,000 European honeybees each on the fourth-storey roof at City Hall this week, to pollinate plants on its new green roof.

The allergic and the easily spooked shouldn’t fear these new municipal building denizens: these docile bees lack a wasp’s cravings for flesh, and won’t sting.

“They’re specifically bred to be more interested in water, pollen and nectar than anything else,” said project manager Russ Golightly.

On the east side terraces of City Hall, roofs on the fourth and fifth floor went green this spring. At about $600,000, that costs 10 per cent more than a traditional roof replacement, but officials hope for energy cost savings in the long term from a roof of soil and grass, rather than asphalt.

They were supposed to be installed last summer, but like so many other plans the flood postponed them.

The plants and grasses went in earlier this year. To ensure the best plant survival and biodiversity, officials looked to beekeeper Eliese Watson for some in-house pollinators. Native bees wouldn’t normally fly up to their levels in great enough numbers to pollinate the fourth-floor plants that existing bees might not find.

“They tend not to fly at that height, so it would be left up to luck, really,” said Watson, founder of Apiaries and Bees in Communities.

She’s the beekeeper for several other colonies in Calgary, including the only other privately managed hive in the downtown — on Hyatt Regency’s garden roof.

In exchange for the free pollen buffet the bees will enjoy, the two file-box-sized hives should produce about 20 pounds of honey in their first year. The city hasn’t yet determined what to do with all that sweet stuff, Golightly said.

Officials envision using the green roofs for research into how they’d thrive on other parts of the City Hall roof or elsewhere downtown. The public, however, won’t be allowed access to the terraces.

jmarkusoff@calgaryherald.com