Toronto Abuzz With Shangri-La’s New Custom Bee Wall
Honeybees are checking in on the third floor Shangri-La Hotel, Toronto’s Garden Terrace.
The hotel has a new Bee Wall installation in partnership with Birks and Alvéole, a Montreal-based organization that promotes and assists with beehive installation, maintenance and honey extraction.
Since the late 1990s, concerns about colony collapse disorder in North American beehives have been growing. The Bee Wall installation addition to the third floor Garden Terrace will not only aid the community by providing plenty of bees to pollinate downtown area gardens and parks, but the honey harvested will also provide the hotel’s culinary and pastry teams with local and sustainable honey for use in the hotel’s kitchen and food and beverage outlets.
The Shangri-La Hotel, Toronto and Birks Bee Wall is made of wax that the bees secrete themselves. Over the season, guests will be able to see through glass the development of this Bee Wall built by the bees. It contains roughly 50,000 honeybees, and is anticipated to yield approximately 20 kilograms (about 44 pounds) of honey by this winter.
The hotel culinary team will create a feature tasting menu using the homemade honey that will debut in late November in Bosk restaurant. Additionally, the hotel’s Lobby Lounge will offer custom cocktails with honey as an ingredient, and the pastry team will add a honey High Tea menu option to the daily High Tea offering. Guests will also be able to purchase jars of home harvested honey to take home.
