Text A: The City Beekeepers

[1] On rooftops above the traffic, in the gardens of office blocks and on the balconies of ordinary flats, a surprising number of people now keep bees. Urban beekeeping has spread rapidly over the past decade, and by one recent count more than 3,500 hives sit on the roofs and balconies of the world's largest cities. It is a curious reversal: the bee, a creature we picture among meadows and orchards, has quietly become a city dweller. Far from the open countryside, these insects thrive among parks, public gardens, window boxes and the flowering weeds that push through every crack in the pavement.

[2] City bees often do better, in fact, than their rural cousins. Farmland can be a surprisingly difficult place for a bee, because vast fields of a single crop offer a brief glut of food for only a few weeks of the year, and little but bare earth for the rest of it. A city, by contrast, is a patchwork of thousands of different plants that bloom in turn from early spring to late autumn, so urban bees rarely go hungry. They are also largely spared the heavy pesticides that coat many farms, sprays that can weaken or kill a hive outright.

[3] The benefits flow both ways. As the bees move tirelessly from blossom to blossom they pollinate the fruit trees and vegetable plots that feed the neighbourhood, and a single well-kept hive can noticeably lift the harvest of every garden nearby. The keepers gain something too: many speak warmly of the deep calm that the slow, careful work brings them, a kind of meditation among the humming frames. A growing number of schools now keep hives of their own, so that children can watch a colony at close hand and lose their fear of an insect most have only ever been told to swat.

[4] Yet the rooftops are not paradise. Bees that are kept too closely together must compete for the same flowers, and an overcrowded city can leave both honeybees and the wild pollinators — the bumblebees and solitary bees that were there first — short of food. Careless or inexperienced owners may also let disease spread from hive to hive, wiping out colonies across a whole district, and a frightened colony can sting passers-by who never asked to share their street with thousands of insects.

Text B: A plan for the pollinators

[5] Some city councils now believe that keeping ever more hives is the wrong answer, and that the real need is to feed the pollinators the city already has. Their proposal is to weave 'bee corridors' through the streets: unbroken ribbons of wildflowers planted along verges, roundabouts and railway banks, so that an insect can cross the whole city without ever running out of food.

[6] The corridors would cost very little, since the councils would simply stop mowing and let native flowers return. Volunteers, rather than paid contractors, would scatter the seed, which keeps the scheme cheap and gives residents a share in it. Because the plants would be native species, they would suit local insects far better than the imported blooms of an ornamental park.

[7] Supporters argue that wild bees, hoverflies and butterflies — not only honeybees — would all gain from the unbroken feeding route. A city laced with flowers would be cooler in summer and pleasanter to walk through, children would pass meadows instead of bare grass on their way to school, and the falling cost of mowing would release money for other green projects.