At Tanger Outlets Deer Park, rooftop beekeeping creates a buzz

If you hear a buzz around Tanger Outlets in Deer Park, it might not be about the latest sales on clothing and shoes.

That hum could be coming from the tens of thousands of honeybees that make their home on a rooftop at the outlet center. The bees, which live in two hives near the J.Crew store, are part of an “urban beekeeping” effort with Montreal-based Alvéole.

Tanger contracted with Alvéole starting in 2021 to have the beehives as part of the center's larger sustainability efforts, said Amaka Muir, marketing director for Tanger Outlets Deer Park. The contract includes an educational workshop done by the hives’ beekeeper, Will Duncan. The honey that's collected is placed in jars and given out at events and to local organizations, Muir said. The hives produce about 100 jars of honey every year, she said.

“People are always surprised when we say we have beehives on the roof,” Muir said.

Tanger employees can keep track of the hives through a site Duncan manages that's like a “bee Facebook page,” Muir said, with photos and updates. 

Alvéole was started by three jazz musician beekeeper friends in 2013, said Noemie Turcotte, head of marketing for the company. For a yearly subscription, the company provides and maintains the hives on the roofs of commercial and residential buildings.

The companies that own those buildings can use the beehives to create tenant engagement and collect biodiversity data that can be used in the companies’ sustainability reports, Turcotte said. In some states and cities, there are tax incentives as well, she said. Hawley Penfold, whose public relations firm represents Tanger, declined to say if the company receives any tax credits for the hives. 

The importance of bees

Turcotte said that environmentally, the bees help maintain a healthy local ecosystem by providing food crop pollination, supporting plant reproduction and contributing to the food chain balance by feeding birds and small animals.

“The more people and the more buildings we can connect to nature, the better and the healthier our cities will be,” she said.

Through educational workshops, tenant events and seasonal honey harvesting, the beehives create social interaction, Turcotte said. Some tenants even have queen bee naming contests, coming up with monikers like Queen Bee-yonce, she said.

“It’s like having your own little farm on top of your building,” Turcotte said.

Alvéole has beehives on more than 2,200 buildings across seven countries, including 155 in New York. There are 10 hives on Long Island: in Deer Park, Garden City, Mineola, Uniondale and Valley Stream.

Last year, the company began installing sensors in hives that will monitor environmental elements that cling to the bees, in order to collect data on local air, water and soil quality, Turcotte said. The hives in Deer Park don’t have this yet, she said, but soon will get sensors to monitor pesticides on the bees.

Duncan, the beekeeper, will visit May Moore Elementary School in Deer Park on Wednesday to share information about the hives. 

Duncan said each hive has about 20,000 to 25,000 Italian honeybees during the summer. He said the bees are just now coming out of their winter dormant state during which they feed off the honey they make during the warmer months when collecting nectar from flowers.

The nectar is stored in the bees’ second “honey stomach” and refined before being regurgitated and passed among worker bees for further refinement. Bees’ wings then help with evaporation to make the honey thicker before it is stored in honeycomb cells made from wax secreted by young worker bees.

Hive sweet home

Beehives are fragile and puzzling systems whose health depends on a variety of factors, from pesticides and weather to mites and available food, Duncan said. He visits once a month to make sure the bees are doing well.

“Each month my job changes, depending on the season,” he said. “But basically the beekeeper’s job is to convince the bees that your hive is the best place to live.”

Most important is to ensure there is a queen and that she is laying eggs, he said, and that there is enough space in the hive so bees don’t start getting fidgety and leave. But for the most part, bees are self-sufficient, and as the weather warms, they head out to pollinate within a three-mile radius of the hive, he said.

“So having a massive amount of bees in your area just increases the biodiversity of all the plants, which makes them healthier and produces stronger plants,” Duncan said.

Marshall Brown, president of the Long Island Conservancy, said the hives seem like a positive addition.

“There’s precious little space for nature here, so we have to make space for it whenever we can,” he said, adding that businesses should also use native plants on their properties.

“More bees means more flowers and more birds," he said. "We have to really start to be better stewards of our yards.”

By Denise M. Bonilla

denise.bonilla@newsday.comdenisebonilla

Denise Bonilla has worked at Newsday since 2003 and covers the Town of Babylon, including the villages of Lindenhurst and Amityville.