Why are honeybees important to me?

If you have found yourself at this website, you may have asked yourself the question, why is this individual pushing for honeybees to be allowed in the City of Romulus?

That is a good question. Personally, I would have to ask a few questions in return. Have you ever tried to hand-pollinate a cucumber vine? What about squash? Ever wonder why you didn't get much yield from your garden?

1. One worker can visit up to 2,000 flowers per day. Honeybees are master pollinators. They are efficient, diligent, and purposeful. They are designed to carry as much pollen as possible. That means they carry pollen from plant to plant. This saves you and me both much time while giving us the most food possible from our gardens!  
2. One hive can produce up to 100-150lbs of honey per year. Been to the supermarket to buy honey lately? It is not cheap! Not to mention, the average jar is about 16oz or less. How often do you go through that much honey? The excess, not only good for you, friends, and family, can also be sold to local restaurants or stores. Can you imagine having your own fresh honey for medicines, tea, baking, sale, and hundreds of other uses!?
3. Honeybees need our help. Honeybees suffer from many parasites, phenomena, and disease that keep them from being abundant. The rarity of their existence in the wild is in part due to human encroachment. Whereas wild hives could be found in many backyard trees, they seldom if ever are seen in the wild. One hive stand can host 60,000 bees. That is a good start, and it helps the local agriculture.

There are a myriad of other reasons of why honeybees are important to us. These are only a few, and hardly skim the surface. Take some timeout today and visit some websites to help educate you about beekeeping, urban farming, and the differences between bees and wasps. You won't be bored I promise! Maybe you'll decide you need a hive for your backyard too!

Here are a few helpful websites:
Michigan Beekeepers Association
Southeastern Michigan Beekeepers Association
Keeping bees in urban and suburban neighborhoods
TED Talk on Every City Needing Bees to be Healthy
Urban Beekeeping keeps cities healthy
How Stuff Works: Difference between bees and wasps

What system produces your food?

From Wikipedia:

A system is self-sustaining (or self-sufficient) if it can maintain itself by independent effort. The system self-sustainability is:

1. the degree at which the system can sustain itself without external support
2. the fraction of time in which the system is self-sustaining

Lets think about a couple things. We do not often see, or experience the processes that produce our food. Whether you are vegetarian, omnivorous, or you manage to live on candy alone, it is all coming from somewhere.

The idea that various components of an economy are labeled "systems" suggest that there is much involved in the end result. That means that there is never just one middleman between you and the farms that produce our food. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of entities putting their hands in the proverbial pie.

example: Farm system → Processing system → Delivery system → Retail system → YOU

This is only a snapshot of what occurs in the food delivery system at large. Each component, from farm to you involves many macro and micro interactions that impact and influence it physically and financially millions of times. 

According to Wikipedia's definition of self-sustaining (or self sufficient), how would you rate yourself and your dependence on all of the systems that play a role in producing the food on your table and in your cupboards?

Lets reverse roles okay?

example: YOU → Backyard system → YOU

Of course, it isn't just that easy. But for sake of demonstration we see how complicated things become when we subcontract out the provision of our daily sustenance. Interestingly, one of the biggest contributors to the success of both systems is guess who? That's right, the Honeybee! 

This magnificent animal is responsible for pollinating 1 of every 3 bites of food you take on daily basis. That's an awful lot of bites! Even if you don't chew 32 times, it was impacted in some way by the Honeybee.
 
Without the Honeybee, both of these systems fail. Which one of these systems do you believe is threatening the Honeybee?