Leigh-Kathryn Bonner, a student at North Carolina State University and fourth generation beekeeper, needed somewhere to keep her beehive while at college. Unfortunately, dorms have pretty strict policies about what you can and can’t bring to college — and beehives weren’t exactly encouraged.
With the permission of the company she was interning for, she was able to keep her beehives on their roof. Shortly after, other companies heard about this project and wanted to be able to make an impact with bees in their companies and communities.
Bee Downtown soon became a business born out of Leigh-Kathryn’s pure love for bees. They now have over 250 hives at 40+ corporate locations such as Chick-fil-a, Burt’s Bees, Delta, and IBM are among a few of the companies that have participated. 
The honeybee hives are installed and taken care of by Bee Downtown. They offer additional programming for their company partners such as hive tours, team building, and leadership development. The companies involved have access to exclusive events and contacts through Bee Downtown.
Not only is Bee Downtown helping the bee population grow, it is helping companies to grow through employee engagement and interaction. Bee Downtown is a great example of a company with a social mission that will impact many.
Bonner hopes that Bee Downtown will continue to “positively impact the environment, educate the public, and provide a turn key sustainability program for businesses.”
This is really something special. I love that Leigh-Kathryn saw a problem and decided to do something. She came up with a wonderful plan to work with corporations in order to help save the bee population by building hives for them. This is a really simple idea but it will bring a great deal of change for the better to the planet as we all need bees in order to acquire adequate food. Ideas like this benefit more than just one person.
The Bee initiative is so huge right now, so I think this is so special. I love how many people are using their gifts to help the environment as well.
Any company that helps bees seems to be taking off right now. I love how Leigh-Kathryn Bonner used her knowledge of and passion for bees to create a new venture that other companies are joining in on.