Busy Bees at VULKAN
Intensive agriculture, the climate crisis, urbanization and land sealing as well as the high use of pesticides are a threat to many insect and plant species. By settling bee colonies at individual VULKAN locations, the VULKAN Group is making a contribution to species protection.
The importance of bees for nature and humans is enormous: An estimated 87.5 percent of plants on earth are pollinated by bees and other insects - the remaining flowering plants are pollinated by the wind. This includes around 80 percent of crops: Without pollination by insects, there would be no apples, avocados or almonds. Without pollination, fodder plants for meat and milk production would be reduced to 10-20 percent of their original yield! Bees and other insects are therefore crucial for almost all ecosystems on our planet, as they ensure the pollination of a large proportion of plants and thus the richness of the food chain. Joint co-evolution plays a decisive role here: many flowers need bees to reproduce; bees in turn need flowers to gather food.
British Bees
In the UK alone, there are around 70 different crops that depend on and benefit from pollination by bees. The small insects are therefore of great value to biodiversity. It is estimated that it would cost farmers in the UK £1.8 billion a year to manually pollinate their crops if there were no wild bees.
“To help protect the species, we decided to establish our own colony of bees on our site in Brighouse,” says Adrian Birkin, Managing Director at VULKAN UK. “We started in the spring of 2023 with around 5,000 to 7,000 bees. A second hive has since been added and we started the winter with around 35,000 to 40,000 bees,” says Keven Barnes from the Sales & Service division of VULKAN Industries Ltd. He attended a 14-week beekeeping course in the run-up to the bee colonization and is the in-house beekeeper. The first honey was harvested in 2024 and was partly raffled off via the VULKAN UK LinkedIn account and partly distributed to the workforce.
Carinthian Bees in Herne
Two colonies of Carinthian bees (Apis mellifera carnica) have also been at home on the VULKAN site in Herne, Germany, since spring 2024. “This bee species is very prolific (produces a lot of honey) and not very aggressive,” explains beekeeper Robin Frisch from the Wanuka urban apiary in Herne, which works with companies and private individuals to establish new bee colonies. The Herne VULKAN bees have already done a great job in their first year and have produced more than 50 kilos of the tasty “VULKAN Gold”, some of which has been purchased by employees and some of which has been given away to customers as giveaways.
“Sustainability is an important and practiced part of our corporate policy,” says Sebastian Meise, CEO of VULKAN. “The establishment of bee colonies and the planting of a flower meadow on our company premises is part of a series of other measures, such as energy savings, material recycling, water conservation and treatment and the installation of photovoltaic systems on our company buildings.”
