A "flower corridor" for bees, crossing the whole city

There is an invisible corridor on the map of this city. It starts at the riverside park in the west, passes through seven pocket gardens, one tree-lined avenue and the flower beds of three schools, and ends at the wetland park in the east. Nine kilometers in all.

The corridor was built for bees.

The story starts with a beekeeper named Old Song and a case of missing bees. Old Song has kept bees on the edge of the city for forty years, and a few years ago he noticed the honey was getting harder to bring in. "When the flowers open, the bees fly out, and fewer and fewer come back." A technician explained it to him. The city's growth had cut the bees' foraging routes. Bees need an unbroken supply of nectar, but the green space in a city comes in scattered pieces, with concrete between them. A bee cannot cross concrete. It wears itself out and dies on the way.

"Bees need a road." The idea reached an engineer in the parks department named Zhou Yue. She took a planning map and drew the route on it with a marker, one green patch to the next, west to east, and the line she drew between them was the whole argument. Her proposal asked for not one inch of new land, only a translation of what was already green. Swap the double-petaled ornamental flowers for nectar plants. Leave a corner of the mown lawn as a strip of wildflowers. Replace the street trees with linden and photinia, trees that give nectar. Turn green space from a bonsai into a relay of stations.

The proposal was hard to push through. Some said a wildflower strip would look like wasteland. Some worried about being stung. Zhou Yue held briefing meetings in one residential compound after another, and her numbers did the arguing. "Bees pollinate a third of the world's crops. Without bees, a third of the food on your table is gone." She also offered reassurance. "Foraging bees don't sting. Hornets sting, and our plan actually takes ground away from the hornets."

The corridor went up a section at a time. Five years on, the results could be stated as numbers. Bee populations along the route had come back, and Old Song's honey harvest had doubled. Butterflies and birds had increased too; in ecology, helping one thing helps a whole chain of them. The wildflower strips that people had called wasteland came up in July thick with color, and the same residents who had complained began stopping on their way home to photograph them. Better still, the corridor became the city's newest scenery. In spring, from the riverside park eastward, cherry, rapeseed and linden came into flower one after another, and residents mapped a walking route along it without being asked.

Building a road for bees is really building another kind of city infrastructure. No cars run on it, no people. Pollinators run on it. It is the capillary system of the ecosystem.

The most affecting stretch is the flower beds at the Experimental Primary School. The children planted and tend the nectar garden themselves, and science class moved outside: watching how a bee takes nectar, how it dances a figure eight to report where the flowers are. One child wrote in his observation diary, "The bees don't know us, but they come to work at our school every day. We are their colleagues." The line was made into a sign and planted at the edge of the bed.

The corridor has an official name now, the Nectar Corridor, and it has been written into the city's green space planning guidelines: any new green space must keep a proportion of nectar plants. Old Song's apiary moved to the wetland park at the far end. He says his bees have posts now. "Nine kilometers of road, and all of it is their workplace."