A Sweet, Buzzy Passion

Visitors touring RMI’s Innovation Center in Basalt, Colorado, will see a novel new addition to the super-efficient building. Three beehives on the roof are now producing gallons of sweet honey. The man behind the bees is Simon Krzych, RMI’s director of facilities and operations.

Krzych (pronounced KSHIKH) grew up in Wisconsin as a self-proclaimed “hippie child” with parents who liked to live off the land and maintain a low carbon footprint. His beekeeper father spent two years in the Peace Corps in The Gambia, Africa, teaching locals  how to remove wild swarms of African “killer bees” from trees, raise them, and harvest their honey.

Krzych says he enjoys working at RMI for its location being right on the river, the efficiency of the building and how it performs, RMI’s mission, and of course the staff. “The staff is amazing, everyone is super intelligent, which is fun for me.”  

One of Krzych’s main passions is beekeeping. About six years ago, Krzych’s wife gave him a fancy Flow hive for Christmas. And he has been keeping bees on his own since then. He now has five colonies at his house, in addition to the three colonies he brought over to RMI. He still calls his father back in Wisconsin and talks to him for hours about bees. “It’s a way to stay connected to my family at home,” he says.

The types of hives that Krzych uses are an innovative update to conventional hive designs — and a perfect fit for the Innovation Center. With this design, “You don’t have to disrupt the bees by pulling the frames, cutting the wax off the top, and extracting the honey on a centrifugal spinner,” explains Krzych. “You just put in a tube, break the comb inside the frames with a key, and the honey flows down the center and comes out the tube. It’s very simple and easy. It’s almost like tap water, where you turn on a tap and it comes out.” With these hives, you can harvest one frame at a time, which means you can get different colors and flavors of honey.

Krzych is dedicated to taking care of the bees, making sure to leave enough honey so they can survive the winter. For ground-mounted hives he keeps elsewhere, Krzych often surrounds hives with non-harmful electric fencing to keep out bears, a constant threat in Colorado. But at the Innovation Center, Krzych places the hives on the roof where the bears can’t get them.

He feels that RMI’s Innovation Center is one of the best locations for his hives. “It’s right on the river so the bees have a water source. There’s plenty of native flowers plus a lot of people in town plant flowers that attract pollinators,” he says.