World’s first supermarket beekeeper starts work at Sainsbury’s
23 June 2010 09:50
Supermarkets can offer a wide variety of careers, from retail management to food technology, to engineering. However, Sainsbury's is about to increase the repertoire of jobs available as it recruits retail's first ever beekeeper.
Bee expert Robin Dean, has been recruited to set up and then maintain a network of 'bee hotels' at 38 stores across London, as the company aims to help the UK's dwindling population of solitary bees. The initiative is part of the company's 'Respect for the Environment' programme.
Bee expert Robin Dean said: "I guess I'm not your average supermarket employee, but the work I'm doing will help protect the long term future of the food Sainsbury's and other supermarkets sell.
"Bees are the unsung hero of the food chain, as most fresh fruit and veg depends on bees for pollination. We hope that by setting these bee hotels up at a network of stores across the city, we'll be able to help rejuvenate the bee population, and learn more about why the population has decreased so dramatically over the past few years."
The hotels are designed to offer an ideal habitat for bees to raise larvae, which are collected by Robin and incubated until they are ready to be placed back into the hotel to hatch.
Robin added: "Solitary bees are different to honey bees. They live in isolation rather than as part of a hive. They don't make honey, so have nothing to protect, making them docile and very unlikely to sting, so customers need not worry!
"This is groundbreaking work by Sainsbury's, which will help increase the ailing bee population as well as hopefully provide academics with a greater understanding of why bee numbers started to decline in the first place."
Retail news is updated every weekday and is provided courtesy of: 
