To those who enjoy eating sweet treats in the sweltering summer sun, bees may just be a nuisance, but they truly are a vital piece of the machine that is nature.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bees pollinate those fruits and flowers so you get a bigger yield, if we didn\u2019t have the pollinating services, we just wouldn\u2019t have as much as we have,\u201d said David Mullins,\u00a0owner of Bee Great and prolific beekeeper in northeast Indiana<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cBees are integral to the environmental ecosystem in Fort Wayne and their importance reaches beyond our borders\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 ORDINANCE G-23-07-03R<\/em><\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Fort Wayne City Council has acknowledged their importance with an ordinance aimed at allowing beekeepers \u2014 properly known as apiarists \u2014 to have additional hives in city limits.<\/p>\n WHEREAS, bees are integral to the environmental ecosystem<\/a> in Fort Wayne and their importance reaches beyond our borders; and WHEREAS, there is no historical or scientific basis for the current limit of two (2) hives per piece of property within City Limits, and traditionally there have not been problems with bees, beehives, or beekeepers\u2026<\/p>\n A SECTION OF ORDINANCE G-23-07-03<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n If the ordinance is passed, the current limit of two beehives per property within the city will be expanded greatly depending on property size.<\/p>\n And not only does that mean more honey for the urban beekeeper, but it also translates to environmental impact<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cEach hive you\u2019re hoping for a five-gallon bucket off each one, that\u2019s about 60 pounds so if you have 8 hives versus 2 hives you\u2019ll get that many more buckets of honey,\u201d Mullins said. \u201cOne of the reasons that people want to have bees is not so much for the honey, it\u2019s because they want to pollinate their garden, they want their fruit trees<\/a> to grow, they want their flower to be bigger and honeybees help with all of that.\u201d<\/p>\n Mullins himself has dozens of hives in Fort Wayne on private residences as a part of his business, and he says that he is the person who could be most affected by the council\u2019s decision.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there are some restrictions now where people feel they can\u2019t have as many colonies as they would like to have,\u201d Mullins said.<\/p>\n He also noted that the increase will allow beekeepers to have much more resilience, an important factor because beekeepers lose large amounts of bees every year.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you have two hives you can pull frames from bees and move them into the other\u2026 if they are two weak colonies going into the winter, both of them you are likely to lose all your bees,\u201d Mullins said. \u201cSo if you have four hives or eight hives, you have that many more resources to make sure the colonies are strong.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To those who enjoy eating sweet treats in the sweltering summer sun, bees may just be a nuisance, but they truly are a vital piece of the machine that is nature. \u201cThe bees pollinate those fruits and flowers so you get a bigger yield, if we didn\u2019t have the pollinating services, we just wouldn\u2019t have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7738,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7737"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7742,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7737\/revisions\/7742"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n