To Bee or not to Bee

Mon 20 Jul, 2026

Did you know that we have an apiary on the rooftop of Shakespeare North?

Introduced in late 2024 and taken care of by a team of wonderful Playhouse beekeepers, the bees have thrived despite the long, dry summer of 2025, which saw huge losses in the bee population. There are 60,000 bees on our roof, which the keepers believe is located at one of the highest points in Merseyside.

Each year our bees produce honey, which we then sell in the lobby (and have frequently received compliments for how delicious it is!) Last year, the bees produced double the amount of honey that we expected, allowing us to not just sell it, but use it in recipes in the Bar & Kitchen!

One thing that makes our apiary special is that its queen is a Black Bee. The Blackbee was once the most common native bee in the UK, but the population dropped massively: so much so that it was believed to be extinct! Thankfully, the species was rediscovered and conservation efforts meant that its population was given a new life. Now they are thriving once more!

When the black bees disappeared, the dominant species were southern European bees, which were not as accustomed to British weather. But the Black Bees are tougher, needing less food during the winter and are less deterred by the changing of the seasons. The Black Bees are crucial to the ecosystem, so it’s really important to us to be helping out Mother Nature with our thriving bee hives. [1]

The Black Bee was introduced to our apiary in late 2024, and quickly became queenright (which means the colony had a living, healthy queen in the Black Bee!) Since then, our keepers have increased the Black Bee population, hoping to continue to do so in years to come!

 

Our happy beekeeper Mckenzie standing by the Black Bee Hive on our roof.

Now, Shakespeare regularly wrote about bees in his works, and usually with these articles we like to include a couple of on-theme quotes; the problem here being that aside from the less-than-cheery “Full merrily the humble-bee doth sing, Till he hath lost his honey and his sting” (Troilus and Cressida. Act 5, Scene 11), most of Shakespeare’s mentions of bees was him viewing them as perfect metaphors for politics.

 “For so work the honey bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.” – Henry V, Act I, Scene 2