After spending $1 billion to buy Charlotte’s Ballantyne office park in 2017, Northwood Office has spent many millions of dollars more to reinvigorate the 535-acres development that is home to dozens of employers.
The major capital investments include taking out a golf course to make room for buildings and more greenspace. And, the owners are taking some simple, low-cost steps to make the region’s biggest suburban office park distinctive.
Like adding bees.
In 2021, Northwood formed a partnership with local beekeeper Robert Suydam to install six beehives at the development, which includes 4.4 million square feet of office space.
“This feeds into the think globally, act locally concept,” says Allyssa Calderhead, who joined Northwood as a sustainability analyst last year. “What’s important in the Charlotte metro area is local agriculture and overall health. Honeybees are a cornerstone species, and they touch a lot of our lives.”
Suydam’s day job is in banking, but his other passions include managing beehives in the Charlotte area and producing honey. The Charlotte native first saw the pollination benefits of bees while working at a community garden.
He started Paddington Honey in 2017 and now oversees several apiaries in the Charlotte area. That includes installations at public parks and atop hotels.
Suydam says bees pollinate an area with a radius of about three miles around his hives. One of Northwood’s sites is in its fairly secluded Ballantyne Backyard area, while the other is near a pond on the west side of the campus.
Production from the Ballantyne bees varies from two to 10 pounds because of many factors. Suydam fills jars with the honey, which Northwood shares with its clients and tenants.
It’s part of Ballantyne’s “rewilding” effort, an overall strategy of sustainability to make a potentially sterile environment more inviting. Other efforts include the Ballantyne Bolt micro-transit program, in which an electric Volkswagen bus ferries workers and apartment dwellers around the development using a smartphone app. Northwood has also partnered with Queens University biology professor Jeffrey Thomas to study birds and the reproduction of native species.
“Sustainability is an iterative process,” Calderhead notes, suggesting more innovative projects are coming at Ballantyne.
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