The bee story

First guests ready to check into the new Toyota Motor Europe hotels
26/06/2015
A few days ago we got some new colleagues in Toyota Motor Europe (TME). Why is this a news? Because they are a bit different…

Preserving nature

We are currently running the 2015 Green Month Campaign and within this action 2 insect hotels were installed in the green areas of our offices. Slogan for this year is “Preserve & enhance nature for the future”. But, what does this actually mean? To preserve nature, we first needed to understand what we had on our sites. After a thorough investigation we realized that there are over 200 species on our sites, and many biotopes (or habitats) which give great potential to enhance biodiversity. The biotopes also show a dynamic interaction between species.

Enhancing nature

We can now move towards enhancing biodiversity on our sites. In this step, two insect hotels have been put up. Following expert advice Toyota is concentrating on supporting wild and solitary bees as a priority, so we are establishing insect hotels to provide shelter and nesting sites. 

We are increasingly making our sites more friendly to these insects by allowing more natural / native flowers to complete their flowering and seed making cycles which, in turn, provide food and nectar for insects. And as we wanted to treat our guests well we have asked Natuurpunt experts for advice how to position them (no, it was not PR who decided where to put them!)

Stay tuned!

Whilst we considered installation of beehives for TME sites, for the purposes of biodiversity enhancement an insect hotel is better than a bee hive. Further, TME sites and neighbouring territory do not have enough food for a beehive which can typically go up to 50,000 individual bees.

Many more activities and projects are planned in the future for making Toyota Motor Europe a more colourful and biodiverse environment. We’ll keep you posted!

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