Originally published 2019-05-28.
The "world's smallest McDonald's" was a real, working beehive built to look like a miniature McDonald's restaurant. Called the McHive, it was created in 2019 by the advertising agency NordDDB for McDonald's in Sweden, as a tribute to Swedish restaurants that had placed beehives on their roofs. It had a tiny drive-thru, an outdoor patio, golden arches and window posters, with room inside for thousands of bees. On World Bee Day it was auctioned for $10,000, with the proceeds going to Ronald McDonald House charities.
The project was clever marketing, and it went viral. It also pointed to a serious question: how much trouble are bees actually in, and what helps them? Here is the story of the McHive, how people reacted, and what the evidence says about bee losses and pesticides.
What the McHive was and why it was built
Several McDonald's restaurants in Sweden had started keeping beehives on their rooftops, and some planted flowers around their car parks to give pollinators more to feed on. NordDDB, the Stockholm-based agency that works with the brand, turned that local initiative into a story by building a one-off hive in the shape of a McDonald's restaurant.
The finished piece looks like a perfect scale model, but it was designed to be lived in by bees rather than looked at on a shelf. Its launch video shows the build from first cuts to the finished hive in a garden.
Images: NordDDB.
How the miniature restaurant was made
The stills from the video follow the build from a plan sketched on a tablet to a carpenter cutting and fitting tiny wooden parts by hand. Inside the decorative shell sits a standard hive box, and in the final scenes beekeepers lower frames covered with bees into it. The makers then added the details that make the model instantly recognisable: the red and yellow colours, the arched logo, the drive-thru window and miniature menu posters. The idea was simple. Anyone who saw the photo would know at once what it represented, and the joke would carry the message about bees.
It is worth separating the object from the claim around it. A branded hive draws attention to pollinators, but a single hive, or even a few dozen rooftop hives, does not by itself raise a country's bee population. Honey bees kept on roofs also compete with wild bees for flowers in the area, so planting more flowers matters as much as adding hives.
How people reacted to the McHive
Online, the McHive was greeted mostly with puns and affection. Commenters predicted that the ice cream machine would "Bee broken", asked whether there was a "fly-through" and vegan options for their bee friends, ordered a quarter pounder "with bees" and joked that the bees would now be too fat to fly. One noted that, counted by number of seated customers, it might be the largest McDonald's of all; another grumbled that the bees had a branch nearby while he had to drive 20 miles to his. A few were more pointed, contrasting attention for insects with human hunger. Here is a selection of the comments posted on Facebook.
How much trouble are bees really in?
The figure most often quoted alongside the McHive came from the United States. In a survey run by the Bee Informed Partnership with the Apiary Inspectors of America and funded by the USDA, beekeepers reported losing 44.1 percent of their colonies between April 2015 and April 2016, up from 40.6 percent the year before. Summer losses were as high as winter losses, which surprised researchers.
That number is real, but it needs context. It measures managed honey bee colonies over one year, and beekeepers replace many lost colonies by splitting healthy ones. Honey bees as a species are not close to extinction. The US Department of Agriculture notes that the number of managed colonies fell from about 5 million in the 1940s to around 2.66 million, while recent totals have grown again, mainly because of demand for almond pollination. The worry is the high and persistent cost of keeping colonies alive.
Researchers point to several causes working together:
- Varroa mites, parasites that arrived in the US in 1987, feed on bees and spread viruses such as deformed wing virus. Beekeepers rank them as their biggest problem.
- Poor nutrition, as farmland with a single crop and fewer wildflowers leaves bees short of varied pollen.
- Pesticides, with effects that range from obvious poisonings to subtler harm to navigation, learning and reproduction.
- Habitat loss and climate change, which hit wild bees especially hard.
Wild bees may be the bigger concern. There are thousands of wild bee species, from bumblebees to solitary mining bees, and many are declining with far less attention than honey bees receive. A 2021 study estimated that the number of bee species being recorded worldwide fell by about a quarter between 2006 and 2015 compared with before 1990.
The "80 percent of crops" myth
Older versions of this story said bees pollinate "up to 80 percent of our crops". That is a garbled statistic. Around 60 percent of crop plant species rely to some degree on animal pollinators, including most fruits and many vegetables, but seven of the ten most important crops by volume, such as wheat, rice and maize, are wind-pollinated or grown without pollination. The 80 percent figure appears to come from a different claim: that honey bees provide about 80 percent of insect crop pollination in the US. Pollinators matter enormously for a varied and healthy diet, but losing them would not mean the end of all food.
Pesticides: the EU ban and the US emergency approvals
In April 2018, European Union member states agreed to a near-total ban on outdoor use of three neonicotinoid insecticides, clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam, taking effect from the end of that year. The decision followed a report by the European Food Safety Authority that found most uses posed a risk to both honey bees and wild bees. Not everyone agreed: some field studies on honey bees found limited effects, and the manufacturer Bayer maintained the products were safe when used properly.
In the United States the picture was different. In 2018 the Environmental Protection Agency issued emergency exemptions allowing sulfoxaflor, an insecticide it considers highly toxic to bees, to be used on more than 16 million acres of bee-attractive crops such as cotton and sorghum. A federal appeals court had cancelled the chemical's original registration in 2015 because the evidence did not show it would not harm bees.
The story was widely shared as a decision of the Trump administration alone, which fact-checkers at Snopes rated misleading. The 2018 figures were accurate, but the previous administration had granted similar emergency approvals for sulfoxaflor in 2012, 2014, 2015 and 2016 to 2017. An EPA Inspector General report in 2018 also found that the emergency exemption process lacked measures to show whether it protected human health and the environment.
Clever marketing, and what actually helps bees
The McHive was publicity, and nobody pretended otherwise. It raised money for charity and got millions of people talking about pollinators, which is more than most adverts achieve. The real test of corporate bee projects is what sits behind them: how land is managed, which pesticides the supply chain uses and whether flowers are planted alongside the hives.
For the rest of us, the most useful steps are local and simple:
- Plant a mix of flowers that bloom from early spring to late autumn, including native species.
- Leave some lawn uncut and some bare soil or dead wood, where many wild bees nest.
- Avoid spraying insecticides in gardens, especially on plants in flower.
- Buy honey from local beekeepers, who help maintain healthy colonies.
- Support farmers and councils that plant hedgerows, field margins and wildflower strips.
A miniature restaurant for bees makes a great photograph. A street full of flowering gardens makes a much better meal.
Sources: 9News: World's smallest McDonald's is just for the bees; NordDDB: McHive video; Phys.org / University of Maryland: Nation's beekeepers lost 44 percent of bees in 2015-16; USDA Agricultural Research Service: Honey bee health and colony collapse disorder; Wikipedia: Pollinator decline; Wikipedia: Neonicotinoid; Snopes, 19 February 2019: Did the EPA approve emergency use of a pesticide harmful to bees?.
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