With bees at the Waldorf Astoria, this yellowjacket had to settle for the Comfort Inn. (Photos by Kaj Siebert and Shutterstock.)
You shouldn’t be too terribly surprised that New York’s fancy-ass Waldorf Astoria has a farm-to-table component in its dining, but what you might find surprising is that there are 360,000 bees currently residing at the top of this landmark hotel. This year so far they have made about 125 pounds of “Top of the Waldorf” Rooftop Honey.
Founder of Bees Without Borders Andrew Coté is running the project, and once it is fully operational, they hope to produce 600 pounds a year. A roof garden is also in the works, in the hopes that potential visitors will see the Waldorf as some sort of adorable little country farm instead of part of an enormous corporation called the Blackstone Group which specializes in mergers and acquisitions and leveraged buyouts.
In the meantime, one wonders what the bees are doing to the bottom line — how many in-room massages they are charging, and what kind of havoc visiting bee hookers might be wreaking on the vanilla vodka in the minibars. We hope that Blackstone Group’s other activities will be able to offset potential financial losses from the bees, or that they will at least make a nice tax write-off.
