Text entered

Sainsbury’s Recruits World’s First Supermarket Beekeeper

Sainsbury

18 June 2010

Supermarkets can offer a wide variety of careers, from retail management to food technology, to engineering. However, Sainsbury's is about to increase the repertoire of jobs available as it recruits retail's first ever bee keeper.
Bee expert Robin Dean, has been recruited to set up, and then
maintain a network of 'bee hotels' at 38 stores across London, as
the company aims to help the UK's dwindling population of solitary
bees. The initiative is part of the company's 'Respect for the
Environment' programme.
Most UK fruit and veg is made possible thanks to bee
pollination, making bees a key part of the food chain, and a
natural resource that the supermarket is keen to protect.
Bee expert Robin Dean said: "I guess I'm
not your average supermarket employee, but the work I'm doing will
help protect the long term future of the food Sainsbury's and other
supermarkets sell.
"Bees are the unsung hero of the food chain, as most fresh fruit
and veg depends on bees for pollination. We hope that by setting
these bee hotels up at a network of stores across the city, we'll
be able to help rejuvenate the bee population, and learn more about
why the population has decreased so dramatically over the past few
years."
The hotels are designed to offer an ideal habitat for bees to
raise larvae, which are collected by Robin and incubated until they
are ready to be placed back into the hotel to hatch.

Robin added: "Solitary bees are different to
honey bees. They live in isolation rather than as part of a hive.
They don't make honey, so have nothing to protect, making them
docile and very unlikely to sting, so customers need not worry!
"This is groundbreaking work by Sainsbury's, which will help
increase the ailing bee population as well as hopefully provide
academics with a greater understanding of why bee numbers started
to decline in the first place."
The project is the latest part of Sainsbury's work to protect UK
bees. Syngenta's Operation Bumble Bee was launched in 2005,
and saw Sainsbury's work with agricultural suppliers to sow a
specially-designed bumblebee seed mix into areas of farmland. The
seed mix, which has now been sown over 500 acres, contains vital
pollen and nectar, which is crucial for the survival of bumblebees
and other insects. Further to this, Sainsbury's introduced several
trial bee hotel at its eco-store in Dursley earlier this year.
Solitary bees have since taken up residence, attracted by the
specially sown wildflower meadow planted around the store.
Neil Sachdev, Sainsbury's commercial director,
said: "Customers expect us to continue to innovate as we
strive to do the right thing for the environment and for
biodiversity in particular.
"We recognise that if we are to continue to sell fresh British
produce in the long term, we are going to have to look at the
problem of declining bee population and do our bit to help solve
the problem.
"When we've gained an understanding of how well the bee hotels
work in these stores, we might well consider making them a standard
feature of Sainsbury's supermarkets nationwide."
The bee hotels are to be set up and maintained by Robin over the
coming weeks. When the hotels are up and running, Sainsbury's hopes
to recruit a student to fill the role full time as part of a
masters degree on biodiversity, with results being fed into several
EU programs looking at long term trends in species diversity. In
most cases, the hotels will be situated on the roofs of the 
stores that have been ear-marked for the network.