Much more than a beehive: 400,000 bees at the Brescia waste-to-energy plant

26 October 2022 - 17:46

Would you ever have thought that bees could build a home inside a waste-to-energy plant? This happened in Brescia. Jean, the beekeeper responsible for it, told us this very special story.

The moment you see him walking around the facility, it is immediately clear that this place is a second home for Jean, even though his clothes are so different from the yellow vests and hard hats worn by all the other people working here. In fact, Jean has been frequenting the Brescia waste-to-energy plant since 1998, the year it went into operation: he was a plant operator, managing the chimney filters. In parallel, he dedicated his spare time to his long-standing passion: bees. However, he never would have anticipated that one day these two very different activities would intersect, bringing his “two lives”, that of an A2A employee (now retired) and that of a beekeeper, back to the same place. 

One day in 2015 the plant manager called me, saying, “There’s a swarm above the turbine room. Do you want to catch it? And so I took the bees home.”

Jean

“But some time later another one appeared at the waste-to-energy plant. At that point I told my manager that it might be an idea to take a beehive and place it in the green areas around the plant.” Over time, the hives grew to four. The 400,000 bees that live there form a perfect orchestra, marking the rhythms of the day with honey and pollination. According to Ispra, the survival of around 75% of agricultural crops and 90% of wild flowering plants depends on them and their fellows around the world. But they also fulfil another function. In their long daily flights (their range can reach up to 2 km from the hive) they “capture” the fine dust which, with the appropriate tests, allows effective monitoring of the level of pollution in a given area. For this reason, these special insects are now often placed in the vicinity of industrial areas to assess their air quality, as was the case in Brescia.

However, bees have been endangered for years now, mainly due to chemical pesticides and climate change, which alters the ecosystem and makes them more vulnerable and less productive. For example, a study carried out in India in 2019 proved how diesel residues in the air significantly alter bees’ ability to recognise floral odours, thereby preventing them from pollinating.

Efforts must be made to save them. The Brescia waste-to-energy plant trial is a step in this direction, aiming to create a facility where bees can continue to carry out their vital work. Here, among other things, the special “workers” also produce honey, which is given to their colleagues at A2A for Christmas. Honey that Jean and the plant managers have analysed every year for its properties. “The first time,” he explains, “we delivered five samples from hives located in different areas (mountains, Lake Garda and others) to a specialised analysis laboratory in Bologna: one of them was from the waste-to-energy plant. The centre could not distinguish the different types of honey. The results were perfectly identical.”

In short, bees at the Brescia waste-to-energy plant play an invaluable role as sentinels of the air, demonstrating their vital role for a sustainable future.

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