Buzzing and humming.

When you hear buzzing and humming on the Felix Graf GmbH factory premises in the future, it won’t just be because production is running at full speed: we have added several tens of thousands of bees to our team.

The bee colonies that we have adopted, which have been on our premises since May, are among our hardest-working employees. Not only do they produce delicious honey, but they also pollinate more than 80 % of the native flowering plants that depend on insect pollination. Bees therefore play an irreplaceable role in maintaining an ecological balance.

Unfortunately, however, the number of these important helpers is declining: in 1950, there were still around 2,000,000 bee colonies in Germany, but today there are only around 800,000. That is why it is so important to work to protect them. With our “factory bees”, we want to make a valuable contribution to environmental protection and species conservation.

The two bee colonies were brought to us by Benedikt Oswald, a member of the Graf family, who will continue to look after them in future. But the relocation was not that easy, as the experienced amateur beekeeper recounts: “Once a year, the old queen leaves the old hive and sets off in search of a new home, taking half of the colony with her. In this case, it was an oak tree 200 metres away from the old hive. The bees made themselves comfortable there, seven metres above the ground. Equipped with a spray bottle, I sprayed the swarm with water and then captured it in a bucket, which was of course not entirely without risk at that height.”

The captured bee colonies were then relocated to their new hives on our premises, where they are now busy working away, surrounded by woods and meadows. The honey that they produce will sweeten the daily lives of our almost 60 employees in the future.