The downtown buzz

For a future full-time beekeeper, Chuck Strahan didn’t get off to a flying start.

He recalls going to the post office with his partner Jay McKinney, who wanted to take up beekeeping, to pick up a box full of buzzing honeybees.

“I said, ‘I’m not getting anywhere near those bees.’ I didn’t want anything to do with it, and for the first 12 months I didn’t,” Strahan said.

That was seven years ago. Now Strahan, a Birmingham resident since 1980, keeps 31 hives in downtown Birmingham and is the owner of City Bee Company. Three of those hives sit on the roof of his home on 20th Street North.

City Bee Company sells honey, including creamed and chili-infused versions, along with beeswax products such as lip balm, body butter, beard balm, hand salve and dog paw balm. Strahan first tested out those products in his kitchen, two stories underneath his rooftop hives, and he continues to make the products in small batches.

Most of his sales are online, Strahan said, but City Bee Company also appears at Pepper Place Market, Woodlawn Farmers Market and the Tuesday night West Homewood Farmers Market. Sojourns Fair-Trade, Smith’s Variety, Redmont Hotel’s gift shop, Dog Days and Whole Dog Market carry some of Strahan’s products, along with a few stores on the Gulf Coast. 

Holler & Dash in Homewood sells his creamed honey and has bottles of City Bee raw honey on the tables. We Have Doughnuts buys chili-infused honey “by the gallon,” Strahan said, for their sweet chili donuts. All this for a company that’s only a year-and-a-half old.

Besides the quality of the honey itself — no chemicals are used in caring for the hives — Strahan said beehives on a rooftop have a certain appeal for buyers.

“People are really intrigued, and even if they’re not urbanites, even if they don’t live in the city, people are intrigued with city living,” Strahan said. “That’s just exciting to them.”

When Strahan and McKinney started keeping bees, they simply gave away the honey to friends and neighbors. As time went on and Strahan overcame his fear of bee stings, he also became interested in using the beeswax. With a background in restaurants, he decided to try out skin-care recipes.

“Beeswax is a hot commodity. It’s in just about anything you buy,” Strahan said.

After testing, throwing away and starting over many times — “a lot of beeswax going in the garbage,” Strahan recalled — he had the products that formed the backbone of City Bee Company. After getting burned out in previous careers, Strahan said he loves having a job that gets him outdoors and meeting other people. But his favorite part is tasting what his bees create. He and McKinney put honey, particularly chili-infused honey, on everything from meats to vanilla ice cream.

“It is a staple at our table. I don’t care what meal we’re eating — breakfast, lunch or dinner,” Strahan said. “It’s like a condiment at our table. It’s good on everything.”

Surprisingly, Strahan said his bees never have trouble finding pollen and nectar. From parks to landscaping, there’s plenty to go around within the roughly three-mile radius his bees travel.

“So if you think about what’s three miles from downtown as the crow flies — gosh, first of all you’ve got Linn Park, Kelly Ingram Park, Railroad Park. You have all the great plantings along the streets downtown … You’ve also got Avondale Park; you’ve got the Birmingham Zoo; you have the Birmingham Botanical Gardens,” Strahan said. “You’ve got a lot of trees and shrubs and flowers within a three-mile period. So no, food’s not a problem.”

Downtown living does affect the honey, though. Unlike rural bees feeding on wildflowers, Strahan said his hives gather pollen and nectar more frequently from trees and shrubs. The result is a darker, thicker honey with a stronger flavor.

Because his bees leave the hive and almost immediately fly upward, Strahan said most of his downtown neighbors wouldn’t know he had bees on his roof if he hadn’t told them. He knows a couple of other people in the city who also keep hives.

“I would say it’s easier to keep bees in an urban area on a rooftop than it is on a five-acre plot of land,” Strahan said. “They’re already two stories up anyway, so by the time they fly up, fly out and start on their trip to where they’re going to collect nectar and pollen, they’re already away.”

Later this month, Strahan will extract honey from the hives for the first and only time this year. Some beekeepers prefer to make multiple harvests through summer and into early fall. Strahan said the single harvest helps him be sure he’s leaving enough honey behind for the bees to eat during the winter, so he doesn’t have to provide substitutes later. Anything the bees make after July is theirs to eat.

The single harvest, along with his no-chemical-treatment policy, fit into Strahan’s desire to interfere with his hives as little as possible.

“I don’t want to use anything that could possibly manipulate the bees to do something or make something that they wouldn’t do if it was a feral hive out somewhere,” Strahan said. “You don’t want to mess with the bees. This is their home; you want them to do what they do.”

Seven years ago, Strahan “didn’t know anything about bees, except they stung me.” While he said there’s still a lot to learn, he said he loves beekeeping so much that even if City Bee closed down, he’d keep his thousands of tiny, flying roommates.

“I certainly enjoy it. Bees are fascinating creatures — they really are. A lot of times when it’s early in the morning or they’re coming back in from foraging in the evenings, I will just sit out there and watch them. They’re just amazing,” Strahan said.

Learn more at citybeecompany.com.