Georgia Tech has had an extraordinary week, Commencement ceremonies were held for the Class of 2026, the institute debuted its new $90 million dollar facility at Bobby Dodd Stadium, housing the football offices, weight room, and recovery areas, then offering premium seating on game days in the Fall.

Less celebrated, a few blocks away at Furst and State streets, hives of activity on the roof of the ever-cool Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design. 

It’s a facility of technological marvel, creativity, and reclamation. The perfect place for urban honeybees to weave their environmental magic.

The beehives of Georgia Tech

Credit: GPB



Jennifer Leavey is a Principal Academic Professional in the School of Biology and the College of Sciences. She is the Director of the Georgia Tech Urban Honeybee Project, studying how urban habitats affect honeybee health and how technology can be used to study bees.

The subtle sign bees were on the premises, muscadine grapes climbing the side of the building. Flowering opportunities for the buzzing honey making campus colleagues. 

We suited up in protective gear in the event the extraordinary creatures lose their patience with our presence. 

Like the people who tend the hives, bees can be temperamental, their stingers are a painful reminder, an uncompromising expression of “get away from us.”

Here we go: 

Jeff Hullinger and Jennifer Leavey at Georgia Tech

Credit: GPB



Jeff: Is this the time of year when honeybees are more active ?  

Jennifer Leavey: Yes, so in the springtime, when the flowers are blooming, they start building up their population and growing their hive, and so it is a very busy time of year.  

Jeff: How long has this been program been here at Georgia Tech?  

Jennifer Leavey:  We started the program in 2012, with bees in 2013. And since then, we've used the bees for all kinds of things, for faculty members who want to use them. So, they're a freely available resource to folks. We had one mechanical engineering PhD student who did her dissertation on how bees load pollen onto their pollen baskets on their rear legs and how they take those pollen baskets off to store the pollen in the hive.

Jeff: What can you do if you're living in urban Atlanta to help ensure bees stay healthy and happy. 

Jennifer Leavey: So, there are quite a few things that you can do to make your yard more hospitable to bees. One is to reduce the use of insecticides. A lot of people in the Atlanta area spray for mosquitoes in their yard, right? But there are no insecticides that kill mosquitoes but don't kill bees. So. I always say, use insect repellent on yourself, rather than spraying your yard.

Jeff: Much has been made over the last 10 years about the destruction of hives and the impact of environmental toxins, poisons, and chemicals. Do things look better? 

Jennifer Leavey: So I would say that there are three main threats to bees and they're interconnected. One is exposure to toxins like pesticides. The other one is disease and the third is nutrition slash habitat. And if bees aren't getting a good diet, their immune systems are weakened, and they become more susceptible to diseases

Jeff: Was there an original academic question for this bee project you wanted to answer? 

Jennifer Leavey: Our original question for the honeybee project was whether having beehives in small pocket gardens or rooftop gardens like this would improve the yield of the garden by providing pollinators.  

Jeff: I would assume that it does  

Jennifer Leavey: Well, bees will fly a mile or two miles away from their hive to find resources that are abundant and taste the best, And so we definitely see honeybees here, but we also see a lot of native bees, like bumblebees and things like that. It's a little tricky to do the experiment in an urban setting because the gardens are so small and you have so many variables to try to figure it out. So, I figure it can't hurt.  

Jeff: The bees fly about a mile in circumference to search for flowers, that’s alot of ground to cover. 

Jennifer Leavey: Yeah that's how far they'll forage. So, they will go and if they find a tree that's blooming or a field of clover, they'll come back to the hive and they'll tell their sisters where that's located and then they all kind of go there.  

Jeff: Are these hives healthy for the most part?  

Jennifer Leavey: Yes, they're great. We've had them in place for 13 years and we bought bees for the first few years to kind of get it started, but we haven't had to buy bees since then. Slowly adapted to their urban environment and they're doing very well.  

Jeff: How else can we help honeybees in urban Atlanta?

Jennifer Leavey: You can plant flowering trees. Bees need flowers and a small pollinator garden with just a few flowers planted in the ground can help but really think about how many flowers are on a big tree like a tulip poplar or a basswood tree. Those are great for bees. So, planting a flowering tree in your yard is awesome. Also, leaving your lawn unmowed or unraked for a while, it won't really help honeybees that much. It'll help other native bee species that nest in the ground. So, bumblebees and digger bees and other species of bees that are ground nesters, they get disturbed when you rake your leaves.  But you know, we must balance the needs of ourselves and the needs our insect neighbors.  

Jeff: Seeing any bee trends in Atlanta via your study?

Jennifer Leavey: Our honeybees have done fine in downtown Atlanta. I think it's hard for bees to make a living in urban areas. But in Atlanta, we have a lot of flowering trees. We have fields of clover if people aren't spraying their yards with chemicals that reduce the amount of clover that's present. So, honeybees in Atlanta do quite well. Our project has really kind of broadened to look at other species of bees other than honeybees, but it's fun to study honeybees because it's an easy to look inside their nests.  

While the Yellow Jacket serves as the Georgia Tech mascot, the campus Honeybees serve as better neighbors, friendlier and more productive. 

More on the bees soon and a look at beekeeping as a hobby around Atlanta in the weeks to come on GPB.