This spring, honeybees have been all the buzz, it seems, with a host of articles published and news features broadcast about the increasing popularity of urban hives and local honey as well as continued documentary reports about the troubling and mysterious colony collapse disorder. Heck, even one of my suburban friends suddenly decided to take an intro to beekeeping course.

So, when I got an invite to get up close and person with a few hundred honeybees, I happily accepted.

Amateur beekeeper (or apiarist) Fred Davis has installed two honeybee hives on the roof of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, home of the Canadian Opera Company. He'll visit the hives regularly over the summer and post periodic updates about the COC's honeybees.

The project was born one day last fall, when Davis, a member of the Toronto Beekeepers Co-operative, peered out his downtown office window. His eye stopped on the roof of the Four Seasons Centre, which he realized was a perfect inner city location to colonize honeybees because of its sunny location located somewhat away from the public and because of the many urban trees and plants nearby -- a bonus because downtown plant life is typically less exposed to pesticides than their rural cousins.

Fingers crossed, the COC's colonies will become a healthy new addition to the area's urban ecosystem. The pollination by the bees will strengthen and diversify plant-life in the neighbourhood and will result in a tidy haul of honey for the COC, too, said Davis (pictured above, at left, with COC general director Alexander Neef).

(The COC's unpasturized honey will not be sold, and the company is still deciding what it might do with its first harvest. Neef suggested the honey might prove a sweet treat for longtime COC subscribers).

I was part of a mini-media swarm introduced to the COC's bees on May 19 and our initial apprehension at being so close to the hardworking little insects quickly disappeared. Already quite busy at building the two colonies, the bees pretty much ignored our noses stuck into their beeswax, our flashing cameras, microphones and scratching pens-on-notepads.

Davis pointed out that, in temperment, docile North American honeybees are the opposite to its pesky, maddening cousins, the hornets and wasps -- so annoyingly interested in humans and their summertime food and drink.

Honeybees are only interested in nectar from plants and will actually avoid contact with humans, he said.

Other neat bee facts we learned:

• Urban beekeeping is relatively new to Canada, with colonies in places like Toronto's Casa Loma, the Royal York Hotel and at Vancouver City Hall. However, urban honeybee hives have been a regular fixture in Europe for decades, including at the Palais Garnier and the Opera Bastille in Paris.
• There are approximtely 600,000 colonies of honeybees in Canada.
• At the height of the season, there can be 60,000 bees in a single hive.
• It takes visits to one million flowers to produce about one tablespoon of honey. The average worker honeybee produces about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
• Honeybees perform a little dance to alert fellow worker bees to the location of nectar and pollen. The dance explains distance and direction.
• Honeybees are not born knowing how to make honey. The elder workers teach the younger ones.
• There is only one queen bee per hive. She grows about 1.5 times the size of the others and lays between 1,200 and 2,000 eggs a day.
• All worker bees are female, but only the queen is able to reproduce. Male bees, known as drones and comprising about 1/4 of 1 per cent of the hive population, do nothing except mate with the queen.
• In the winter, worker bees continue to maintain the temperature of the hive at about 33 degrees Celcius to protect the queen. The drones, who are of no use in the winter, are expelled from the hive in the fall.