Recently I visited Bee Downtown, which is a company started by Leigh-Kathryn Bonner, which sells rooftop hives to companies in downtown Durham and Raleigh. Bee Downtown sells rooftop hives to companies who support bees and want to become more involved. Leigh-Kathryn had always been interested in beekeeping because the majority of her family was beekeepers. She started Bee Downtown as a small business, which grew and grew. Bee Downtown had five hives on their own rooftop, and a dozen other hives around downtown Durham and Raleigh. Bee downtown helps to promote beekeeping in urban areas where not much pollination is occurring. The bees are strategically placed downtown so that they have easy access to water. Another great thing about rooftop hives is that they help to pollinate windowsill plants that would not get pollinated otherwise because there is no nearby hives. After Leigh-Kathryn showed be around Bee Downtown, she took me to a grassy area across the street. In the small field was almost 50 christmas trees, each one representing a company or nonprofit in Durham. The trees were judges to see which was the best, and the winner got a prize of $5,000. Bee Downtown’s tree has flowers, bees and hives all over it. At the bottom of the tree was sihs showing everything that we would not have without bees. I was very surprised by some of these signs so I decided to do some more research on what bees pollinate. I learned that without bees, there would be no apples, cherries, almonds, blueberries, cotton, cantaloupe, potatoes, celery, cashews, and many more everyday foods.