Bee Happy Hotel at Leonardo Hotel Manchester Central

To mark the £2.9 million transformation of Leonardo Hotel Manchester Central and its brand new look, the hotel is opening its doors to worker bees looking for somewhere to hibernate over the winter.

The ‘Bee Happy Hotel’ is situated on the deck of Leonardo Hotel Manchester’s brand new Oddsocks Bar & Kitchen and will support the local buzzing population during the cold winter months!

With help from the Manchester and District Beekeepers Association (MDBKA) and Hulme Garden Centre, our Bee Happy Hotel was designed to prevent the decline of the Manchester bee population. Bees also have a close association with Manchester, and have been adopted as the symbol of the city. We’ve been learning a lot about bees and we’d like to share our knowledge! Check out our favourite bee facts with thanks to the MDBKA!

- Bees are beneficial insects because they produce honey and pollinate crops.  

- Bees communicate with each other about food sources using dances.

- A Queen bee can lay 1500 eggs in one day!

- Workers must visit over four thousand flowers to make just a tablespoon of honey.

- The Drone Bee is so lazy! They sit around the hive being looked after by the workers or hang round on the bee equivalent of street corners waiting for a young queen to come by.

- If a Drone Bee mates with a Queen Bee, he dies in the act.

- Bees and wasps are closely related. The main difference is that bees provide their young with pollen and honey, while wasps eat animal food, insects, or spiders.

- Worker Bees never stop… working! They clean and guard the hive, feed the babies, build the honeycomb, collect nectar to process into honey and even keep the hive cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

 - Worker Bees can also tell if the Queen bee is safe and if a new bee trying to creep in is a stranger from another hive coming to steal their precious honey.

 - The process from egg to adult can take as little as 16 days for a queen or as long as 24 days for a drone – what a short childhood!