Urban Beekeepers Saving The Planet One Bee At A Time

DETROIT (WXYZ) - We depend on them for much of our food supply, but bees are dying off. The good news is there are a lot of people, even in urban environments like Detroit, doing their part to save the bees.

Rich Wieske has been a beekeeper for ten years. It started as a way to make honey for his mead-making hobby. But after the death of his daughter in a car accident it became more of a therapy. “This is my vacation,” he says, “this is how I relax.”

Rich also understands the bigger importance of what he does. Thirty percent of the world’s bee population has disappeared. No one knows precisely why. It’s called Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD. “They call it a disorder,” Wieske says, “because they don’t have a specific pathogen or disease.” But it’s widely suspected man is responsible somehow.

So men, and women like Rich and Carrie Smith are doing what they can to revive the dying honeybee population. Carrie met Rich at a farmers market a few years ago and began her own love affair with bees. And she in turn is getting her friends involved. “I don’t want (my children) to think that food comes from a fast food drive through.” She says. “It’s important to the sustainability of our world.”

Fred Dyer couldn’t agree more. He’s a professor at Michigan State University and has studied bees for years. “For most of human history honey was the only common abundant source of sugar for human populations.” He tells us. “But much more important than that was their value in pollinating plants.”

Zina Denevan keeps hives in Ferndale. She sees a bigger threat in Colony Collapse Disorder. “I think bees are sensitive,” she says, “so in a way they’re like a canary in a coal mine. So maybe they’re demonstrating to us, the fact that they’re dying off, they’re demonstrating to us that we’re harming the earth.

So, as the world’s honeybee population continues to shrink and threaten the future of our food supply, there is a growing group of people in the Detroit area doing what they can to save the environment one bee at a time.