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The beekeeper on the roof: keeping bees in the middle of a city

You are going to read an article. Six sentences have been removed from the article. Choose from the sentences A-G the one which fits each gap (1-6). There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

On most mornings, before the office workers arrive, Rhiannon Price climbs six flights of stairs, pushes open a heavy fire door and steps out onto the roof of a department store in the middle of the city. Up here, among the air-conditioning units and satellite dishes, she keeps twelve beehives. [GAP 1] “People expect bees to live in the countryside,” she says, lifting the lid of a hive. “In fact, a city can be a very good home for them. There are parks, gardens, window boxes and trees along almost every street, and because nobody is spraying crops with chemicals here, the flowers are often healthier.” Rhiannon didn’t plan to become a beekeeper. Eight years ago she was working as an accountant on the fourth floor of the same building, and she used to eat her lunch on a bench in the square below. [GAP 2] She asked one of them what they were looking at, and he pointed upwards: a swarm of several thousand bees had settled on a lamp post. The man turned out to be a local beekeeper who had been called to collect the swarm. Rhiannon watched, fascinated, as he gently brushed the bees into a cardboard box. [GAP 3] Within a month she had signed up for a beginners’ course, and within a year she had persuaded the store’s managers to let her put two hives on the roof. Not everyone was enthusiastic. Some staff were worried about being stung, and the managers wanted to know who would be responsible if anything went wrong. [GAP 4] In eight years, she says, there has not been a single complaint from customers or staff. The honey is now sold in the store’s food hall, and it sells out within days of each harvest. Its flavour changes through the year depending on what is in flower. [GAP 5] Customers, Rhiannon says, are often surprised that something produced in the middle of a city can taste so good. Last year the store sold more than four hundred jars. However, she is keen to point out that more hives are not always better. Some experts now worry that in certain cities there are too many honeybees competing for the same flowers. [GAP 6] For that reason, Rhiannon spends as much time planting flowers as she does looking after her bees. She has helped schools and residents’ groups across the city to create wildflower gardens, and she advises people who want to help bees to start with a window box rather than a hive. “Bees are a good reminder that cities aren’t separate from nature,” she says, as a few of them land on her sleeve. “We just have to make a little room for it.”

• A. One day she noticed a small crowd staring at something above their heads.
• B. Rhiannon answered their concerns by explaining that honeybees are rarely aggressive unless their hive is threatened, and that the roof is closed to the public anyway.
• C. Unlike honeybees, these wild species rarely make honey, so most people never notice them.
• D. This can leave less food for wild bees and other insects, which are already struggling.
• E. It is not, she admits, the most obvious place to find them.
• F. In early summer, for example, it is light and sweet, while the honey collected in autumn is darker and has a stronger taste.
• G. Before he left, he gave her his phone number and told her to call if she ever wanted to learn more.