World Bee Day aims to strengthen measures to protect bees, which are vital pollinators for almost 90% of the world’s wild flowering plant species and more than 75% of global food crops. Despite their importance in supporting food security and biodiversity, bees are under significant threat worldwide from intensive and monocultural farming practices, land-use change and habitat loss, pesticides and rising temperatures linked to climate change.
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars is actively involved in helping to safeguard these essential, remarkable and highly vulnerable creatures. In 2017, the company established an Apiary at the Home of Rolls-Royce in Goodwood, West Sussex. The Apiary is home to around 250,000 English Honey Bees, which reside in six traditional English-crafted wooden beehives. As well as foraging on the 42-acre Rolls-Royce site, with its half-a-million trees, shrubs and wildflowers, together with eight acres of sedum plants growing on the manufactory’s ‘living roof’, the bees roam over the surrounding 12,000-acre Goodwood Estate, at the heart of the South Downs National Park. Each year, ‘The Rolls-Royce of Honey’ is meticulously hand‑processed by local specialists and served to guests of the marque, including customers commissioning their motor cars in the company’s Atelier suite.
The United Nations designated 20 May as World Bee Day to mark the birthday of Slovenian artist, designer and apiculturist Anton Janša (1734-1773). Considered the father of modern beekeeping, Janša pioneered many methods still in use today. In his seminal treatise A Full Guide to Beekeeping, published posthumously in 1775, he declared: “Amongst all God’s beings there are none so hard working and useful to man with so little attention needed for its keep as the bee.”
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