IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 1

For most of the twentieth century, keeping bees was understood as a rural occupation. Hives belonged beside orchards and field margins, tended by people with space to spare. The idea that a colony might thrive on a city rooftop would have struck most beekeepers as eccentric at best. Yet across Europe and North America, the number of registered hives inside city boundaries has risen steadily since the mid-2000s, and in several capitals urban colonies now outnumber those in the surrounding countryside.

The reason is not sentimental. Cities turn out to offer bees a longer and more varied foraging season than modern farmland does. A single square kilometre of intensive agriculture may carry one flowering crop that blooms for three weeks and nothing else. The same area of city carries parks, cemeteries, railway embankments, balcony planters and street trees, each flowering at a different time. Urban temperatures also run one to three degrees warmer than the surrounding land, which extends the season at both ends.

Honey yields reflect this. Studies in Berlin, Paris and Chicago have recorded urban colonies producing as much honey as rural ones, and in some years rather more. What surprised researchers was the chemical profile rather than the quantity. Urban honey was found to contain pollen from a far wider range of plant families, and levels of heavy metals were generally below the thresholds set for food safety — a result that ran against the expectation that city honey would be contaminated by traffic.

Enthusiasm has not gone unchallenged. A number of entomologists argue that the focus on honeybees has distorted public understanding of pollinator decline. The honeybee is a managed, domesticated animal kept in dense concentrations for its produce; it is not, on any conventional measure, endangered. Wild bees are the group in trouble, and there are some twenty thousand species of them. Placing hundreds of managed colonies in a small area may increase competition for a limited supply of urban flowers.

Evidence for that competition is mixed but not negligible. Work in London and Basel found that wild bee abundance fell measurably within a few hundred metres of dense clusters of managed hives, though the effect disappeared where flower cover was high. The conclusion most researchers now draw is conditional: urban hives are harmless, or beneficial, where forage is abundant, and harmful where it is not. Whether a city helps or hinders its bees therefore depends less on the hives than on the planting.

This has quietly shifted what campaigners ask for. A decade ago, the standard recommendation to a city authority was to permit or subsidise rooftop hives. Increasingly the recommendation is to change how public land is mown. Leaving verges uncut until midsummer, planting native flowering species in parks, and tolerating what gardeners call weeds all raise forage across an entire district at a fraction of the cost, and they benefit wild species that no hive can help.

Beekeepers themselves have proved receptive to this argument, which is perhaps the most encouraging development of all. Several city associations now cap the number of hives they will register in a given district and require new members to demonstrate nearby forage before approval. The urban hive, in other words, is being reframed: not as a rescue operation for a threatened species, but as one part of a wider question about what a city chooses to let grow.