“It’s not just about making honey. What we are fundamentally doing is changing our relationship with nature. It is about looking at how we can connect people back to nature in the city, and how we use that to create a more inclusive community, and at the same time to enrich the environment that is around us.”

It’s a warm but windy day, so we are speaking inside Bybi’s storage room, where founder Oliver Maxwell immediately gets told by a customer from the other side of the room how much she is buying and confirming that she has transferred the money from her phone. It’s clear that it is not the first time they see each other, and Oliver just answers, “That’s ok, I trust you.”

Bybi’s office is located in the small enclaved area of Sundholm in Copenhagen. Originally built and to some extent still functioning as an area where the homeless, people with addiction and socially related issues can get help, shelter, treatment as well as work while being on the edge of society. Oliver explains that they choose this location not because they were looking for it specifically, but because it was the only place open minded enough to let an idea as Bybi in. Being of a background in anthropology, Oliver has a big interest for the meeting of the rules and structures of society and the wild side of human nature, as well as what it means to be a human in nature.

Looking inside a beehive, we can observe a kind of society. The bees are communicating, looking, calling and organising inside their hives. The way different cultures have looked at bees are reflecting back themselves in many ways. “The ancient Egyptians thought honey was more valuable than gold. The ancient Greeks saw this pyramid structure in the hive where a supreme ruler (the queen) is ruling over the others (the working bees). The Victorians were obsessed by bees and honey as a symbol of capitalism. They saw the workers toiling for the queen to produce this profitable honey. And that model we still talk about today when we say things like “Working hard as a bee,” explains Oliver. “Bees communicate in sophisticated ways, and their societies are actually democratic in a sense. Today we are standing in front of so many societal problems to be solved, and looking at bees we can learn some things for how to deal with these issues and show us a different way of being together in society. We work in partnerships with businesses, social projects, community organisations, we work to show that we are not just passive consumers, but we are all active co-producers,” he adds.

Oliver founded Bybi after the climate conference in 2008. The outcome of the discussions had put him under unrest and frustration with trying to find actual ways to establish system critical businesses. Riding on his bicycle in the outskirts of Copenhagen one following day, he saw some bee hives. The sight brought him to think of stories and memories of bees and as he had never tried beekeeping before, he went to meet the beekeeper, eventually started practicing, and the Bybi project was started eventually up and running in 2009.

“Bees, and especially honeybees play an essential role in the natural environment as well as in farming where they are the main pollinators of wild as well as domestic plants. But it is not the bees themselves that are an environmental benefit” says Oliver, ”It is the behaviour we attach to them and around them. It’s how we use the bees to encourage people to plant more flowers, and to change the environment in which they are living.” In the Bybi project, the bees works as a “bridge” to understanding such things. “Making honey demands three things: a beekeeper, flowers and some bees. If you try to focus on one of these, you will have an imbalanced system.”

Bybi shows us that the social and the environmental is the same, in a world where we have decided to keep them apart. Oliver tells that the cause of why we are facing a catastrophic climate situation is because we have kept these issues separate. “Our means of producing is what actually influences the environment around us. So we need to enrich it, we need to make sure we leave things in a better condition than the way it was found.”

One of the companies who Bybi is working with is a big, multinational company that pays them for keeping bees by their factory. Initially, the factory workers thought the initiative was so good that they wanted more. They eventually dug up all the grass around the factory and started planting fruit trees and flowers, and 25 of the workers are now serving as voluntary gardeners. “In that way you transform a physical space. You create new social connections, both within and outside the factory. You create a new understanding of the human connection in a global conflict. And you produce some honey which becomes a symbol of all these relationships together.” Oliver says.“There are livelihoods, there are environments and there are new connections that are bound together in that action of producing stuff. We are not inspiring people to be thinking of, we’re encouraging them to do.”

Oliver tells me that Bybi, with a yearly production of 5,5 tonnes of honey, is the largest urban honey producer in Europe. The 150 bee colonies located in 30 different places around Copenhagen. Each of these sites are producing honey of clearly different colour and taste. The only two things that affects these factors; the flowers available, and the weather. The bees can only fly when it is warm and sunny, and they will always choose whatever is nearer and most convenient. Oliver also stated that although it might seem contradictory, urban produced honey is not contaminated in any way, and since there are basically no pesticides or fewer genetically modified plants in the city, as well as heavy metals exhausted from cars not being soluble in water, makes the nectar free from such things. Bees are also very sensitive to smell so they will avoid polluted nectar, and would they bring it to the hive, they would be rejected by the guard bees.

“Honey production is something that changes our perception of space and property. The bees don’t respect anybody’s boundaries or private property. They go to everybody’s apple trees. So all we need to do is to borrow a square meter of space on a rooftop or in the yard of some business, and then the bees will do the rest.” He continues, “It a fascinating natural phenomenon, people love the bees, and the activity they bring to their flower beds. But again, we could recalculate our whole city like this. So there would be bees, butterflies, bumblebees and other pollinators, and people would invite them into their private area. So that is what we are doing.” The products of Bybi are tested every year and there are never any concerns regarding food safety.

Being a non-profit organisation that relies on sponsoring itself, Bybi sells their products as well as gains some funds through business relations. Except for producing pure honey, Bybi also has a wide range of other products made in collaboration with other local companies such as beer, candy, rum and ice cream. A part from this, they also have collaborations with restaurants, for instance Noma, to who they were selling bee larvae, as well as for artists who are using bee products for different sorts of crafts and artistic practices, or musicians using their unique spaces for performances.

The way honey and honey making is interpreted by Bybi provides a way on understanding nature, and the role that it plays in the city. In our everyday lives, this is something that often can go lost as the distance and opportunities to leave urban areas might be difficult to combine with a life lived in the city. Bees are one of our most precious insects, serving for the pollination of a great part of our flora. At the same time they are threatened by climate change, and rising temperatures and changing weather conditions might put them of their job, as it doesn’t take much more than a few degrees of change, or rain, for them to abandon their very important role in the ecosystem of the world. The way our future will look is depending on how we are treating the planet, and at this critical point, bees symbolizes a species that reminds us of this.

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All photos by Markus Oxelman
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Markus Oxelman & Natsuko Natsuyama

Met in 2017 in Copenhagen while they were both staying in the same shared apartment. They bonded quickly over both enjoying the travelling lifestyle, food, wine, art and music among other things. Both are based between Copenhagen and Tokyo but also spends occasional time in Georgia. Started writing about Copenhagen and Georgia in 2018.
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