![Hamburg Airport - Start [Alt+0]](/resources/img/cached/logo_hamburgairport.gif){kind=logo}
Press release
- 07.05.2009
- Bees test the purity of the airport air
The biodetectives are out and about again at Hamburg Airport: six bee colonies are headquartered near the runways this summer. Between 80,000 and 120,000 busy honey makers are taken care of by airport apiarist Ingo Fehr and Axel Schmidt, Director of the Centre for Environmental Protection at Hamburg Airport. This is the tenth year that Hamburg has been monitoring the air quality around the airport in this way. The test works as follows: environmental damage to plants blossoming in the vicinity of the airport indicates impurity in the air. Pollutants will be present in the nectar and pollen from these plants, gathered by the bees, can later be detected in the honey.
Hamburg Airport – a pioneer in bio-monitoring
This so-called bio-monitoring using bees has already proven itself at Hamburg Airport. As early as 1999, Hamburg Airport deployed bee colonies to detect pollutants – the first airport in Europe to implement this idea. Other German and European airports have since followed suit. “Examinations in recent years have shown that the honey is, in terms of fitness for human consumption, consistently, absolutely perfect. The air at and around Hamburg Airport is clean and of the highest quality,” says Axel Schmidt, Director of the Centre for Environmental Protection at Hamburg Airport. In recent years, five or six bee colonies have regularly been stationed at the airport. The average harvest is 150 kilograms of honey. One kilogram of honey is produced from three kilograms of nectar; for this, the bees have to visit 15 million blossoms in the course of approximately 150,000 flights. The delicious, rich varietal airport honey is presented as a gift on special occasions.