Is the modern economic system broken? These urban beekeepers think so, and this is their solution

At Bybi in Copenhagen, a dedicated group of staff and volunteers have built a community for all centred on the production of honey, much of which is given away for nothing. Could it be replicated elsewhere?

T he bees at Bybi, a collective of beekeepers in Copenhagen , live on the roof. Their home is a complex of Victorian buildings, right in the centre of the city, that looks like an idealised vision of the modern social enterprise, ennobled by the architecture of the past. It’s a place of cottage industry in concert with nature, where the marginalised are brought in from the fringes and corporations stand waiting to help, where jobs happen but a lot of the work is done by volunteers, and where, this bit is important, a lot of time is spent discussing ideas.

Oliver Maxwell, Bybi’s 48-year-old founder, encourages me to examine the buildings more closely. They were once a prison, a workhouse and a hospital; their functions today, a homeless shelter, a young offender institution and, until recently, a job centre, are not so different. Denmark’s Victorian transformation, from “agricultural backwater to industrialised agriculture”, was reflected in how they treated people, Maxwell says.

In the middle of it all is the collective, which looks like a lot of things, a commune, a kitchen-table business, an art space. Everything smells of honey. Long drapes in earthy colours frame the entrance to a space where volunteers jar honey by hand. Small pots are stacked against a window in what appears to be a random formation, but this turns out to be a stylistic map of the city: each jar is from a particular street, with its own shade and its own taste, thanks to “the flowers people planted, the weather, the bees’ own decisions and choices”, as Maxwell puts it.

“Bybi is a constellation of time, work, money, community and connection, a place asking an open question: what would it take for bees, people and communities to thrive?” he says. Between 40 and 50 volunteers come in and out throughout the year, with a core team of 15 undertaking practical, honey-related tasks and events.

They have 80 to 100 colonies, not just on this rooftop, but all over the city, on businesses and conference centres, schools, municipal buildings, restaurants. They produce between four and six tonnes of honey every year. How that turns into money really depends.

Sometimes they give it away, at weddings and festivals. “Honey is an invitation,” Maxwell says. “It wants you to come in as a co-creator, with a joint responsibility for its health. We ask that you share it with someone you care for. And you plant a flower to help the bees.”

Sometimes they sell it in the old-fashioned way, at a couple of boutique delicatessens around the city. Sometimes they ask people how much they want to pay; some are generous, some are not. Sometimes they discuss it in a reverse haggle, sitting in a group where they, as sellers, start low; the bidders tend to drive the price higher by thinking deeply about what went into the honey.

Maxwell, an anthropologist, is originally from the UK. He spent time in Vietnam doing forest protection, some more in Brighton training social enterprises, then arrived in Denmark in 2007, setting up Bybi along similar lines in 2010. The plan was to employ homeless and other marginalised people, who would then be absorbed back into society. Honey would be made at the same time. Bybi also employed a social worker, “who was always a really nice person”.

The problem is, “it just doesn’t work”, he says. “The bottom half of the jobs market has fallen out and everyone else has to run faster and faster. The moment you make contact with the market economy, everyone just melts. We’re sitting here with a crisis of community, a loneliness crisis , a crisis in the meaning and purpose of work. People need to do stuff, we’ll find stuff to do. But the labour theory of value, where you create worth with your time, your boss takes it and gives you some back that you can live on? That does not work.”

They abandoned the “giving homeless people jobs” agenda. Now, people come because they want to, not because they’ve been forced to by the job centre. Five or so people are employed, with more in the summer; there are scores of volunteers, including disabled people who pack flower seeds. “They do it as slowly as they like and we give most of the seeds away for free,” Maxwell says. “It’s outside the logic of work.”

And yet jobs are found. Maybe that, like the honey, is a byproduct of the bees. Back on the roof, 53-year-old Aref Haboo, the principal beekeeper, is looking for the queen amid sheets of honeycomb. The Syrian Kurd, who came to Denmark in 2014, finds her first time with an instinct gleaned from 18 years doing this job in the Afrin province of northern Syria, before he was displaced by Islamic State. Bees can recognise faces , apparently; they can also count and maybe even dream.

Anne-Louise Krogh Hornbech Jensen, 34, who wrote her dissertation on Bybi and now works here, says she always sticks by Haboo around the bees because then she doesn’t get stung, which is as much proof as a bee could give you that they recognise faces. Haboo says Danish honeybees are less aggressive and more productive than Syrian bees.

This haphazard income stream isn’t the only thing keeping Bybi afloat. Its partners include universities, architects and corporations such as L’Oréal, which took some bees for the land at the back of a distribution centre. “The director became fascinated and stopped cutting the grass,” says Maxwell. “He got bat boxes, bird boxes, hedgehog boxes. They sponsored our work with schools. Employees collected the seeds and took them home, so the biodiversity of the field was spreading through the city. The director discovered a kestrel was nesting there when he found a dismembered rabbit.”

When rewilding, says Nicolas Hansen, a 27-year-old volunteer and nature management student, “you have to be OK with saying: ‘Our primary interest is not humans.’ You have to give nature its space.”

Those various sponsorships support schools programmes at Bybi, plus they collaborate with a lot of artists. People sometimes write messages to the bees, just catching them up with the news, recalling a preindustrialised era when many households would keep a hive or two and talk to the bees.

Refugees also work here, while people on incapacity benefits volunteer, but no one would call this a project for employing refugees or refurbishing the economically inactive. “We also have corporate refugees volunteering,” Maxwell says breezily, describing the volunteers burnt out by their high-flying jobs. Andrew Japp, a 52-year-old from Scotland, says: “I’d call myself more of a transient.”

Every society projects their image on to honeybees. Ancient Egyptians said they were the tears of the sun god Ra, to reinforce the divine right of the pharaoh, who was given the title Nesut-Bity, “he of the sedge and the bee”. To Aristotle, bees were the first “political animals”, organised in city states. In Manchester, the birthplace of modern capitalism, there is a bee on every lamp-post. All the language we use about them, hives, colonies, workers, queens, makes them not just capitalism’s mascot, but an attempt to reconcile the contradictions of the new, self-correcting market economy into a coherent picture, modelled in the natural world.

“We layer this industrious language on them, but it’s completely wrong,” Maxwell says. “The relationship they have with a flower isn’t toil, it’s sexual. It’s the reproduction of life in a language of touch, taste, smell, dance, colour; the hair they have on their eyeballs, the way they can hear through their feet. It’s an intense sensory experience and it can only be understood as pleasure. They’re not obeying an order. They’re obeying their senses telling them it’s gorgeous.”

Bybi’s mission is sometimes described as “degrowth” or “regeneration”. Both apply, but neither captures the sense of urgency, that “we’re all living with this cognitive dissonance all the time, that everything bad is being hyperscaled, from AI to El Niño , yet we’re meant to exist as if everything works and nothing has changed,” says Maxwell. “The problem here is that we need to change metaphors.”

Often, when it makes a decision, Bybi will deploy what the philosopher Bruno Latour called the “parliament of things”, a bid to expand democracy to take in nonhuman agents such as animals, rivers and plants. “Stay with the trouble,” is Maxwell’s watch‑phrase, or one of them, referencing Donna Haraway’s 2016 book, in which she argues that, in the face of ecological crisis, we shouldn’t wait in despair to be rescued: instead, form bonds of care and fight like hell.

Madeline Pugh, 26, is a student volunteer from the US. She says Denmark is the perfect sandbox for this experiment: “As a culture, it really appreciates and finds beauty in slow processes, taking time to build something with good intentions.” But it’s not a sweet story of easy integration and togetherness. Haboo’s life outside the bees is precarious, he got a speeding ticket the other day that could have jeopardised his citizenship application, even though he has been in Denmark for 12 years and his wife and children are here, too.

“Danish society makes out it’s all about sourdough and pretty girls on bicycles, but it’s incredibly racist. It wins all the prizes for being livable, but not if you’re brown,” Maxwell says.

There is a raging debate about honeybees in Denmark, which is a kind of nativism with the sting removed (ironically): there are 293 species of bee in the country, but only one makes honey; all the others are, to varying degrees, endangered. People make the argument that honeybees aren’t properly Danish, that they are taking work from wild bees, that they are sexually promiscuous, that they spread diseases and that they are a conspiracy of the EU and industrial agriculture. Honeybees are so connected with industrial agriculture that they have become a lightning rod for rural communities who feel trampled by it, who see themselves as the disenfranchised wild bee in this equation.

As much as honey is all around, Bybi isn’t taking the honeybee’s side in this culture war, it wants to introduce a relationship with bees that enriches conditions for all pollinating insects. That means more flowers planted and more spaces left to be rewilded, but also, on a deeper level, more people engaging with the interdependence between our activities and the ecosystems that sustain us.

As part of an internship at Gehl, a design consultancy that specialises in urban transformation and community-building, Pugh is doing a project on the eight components of awe, as defined in Dacher Keltner’s 2023 book, Awe. These are moral beauty (other people’s kindness or courage); collective effervescence (bees are good at this); nature; music; art; spiritual and religious experience; life and death (being present at one); and epiphanies. “A lot of people here are keepers of awe,” she says.

There is no blueprint that could replicate the precise alchemy of people, place and nature found at Bybi. But an experiment in cooperating across species and within our own, to bring in everyone from the suits to the left-behind, to foster a sense of common purpose and imagine a post-industrial future? That must be scalable.