Detroit was rapidly becoming an expansive apiary community when the video below was filmed in 2018. That was pre-pandemic, so we wondered how the bee world and the community has been doing during these challenging times.
The good folks at Detroit Hives, Tim Paule and Nicole Lindsey, got the idea to "bring life back into the community." Before the city became heavily industrialized, there were a lot of bees in the area. Bees were still easy to find outside the city, but at the time the video was filmed there were over 90,000 vacant lots in the city and many of them were overgrown with natural, wildflowers and weeds that bees and other pollinators love.
This 2:38-minute video by Culture Trip shows how the people and the bees enjoy each other's company in Detroit:
The people that held the vision began transforming vacant lots into urban bee farms. The bees love it. Children were learning all about where honey comes from and how hard bees work. The entire community was being educated about the positive impact that bees have on the environment and on our lives.
These beautiful people are so welcoming and proud of their community, Eastside Detroit, where they live a unique lifestyle and love their bees. This is a 1-minute video by Eastside Community Network:
The video above is around one year old. Detroit Hives seems to be doing okay despite the pandemic. Here's hoping the community has pulled through well, and that the hives are humming and the bees are buzzing in Eastside Detroit.
We dug a little deeper, and found that National Geographic did a fantastic 6-minute segment in June 2019 about how Detroit Hives and honeybees are revitalizing the city after it was abandoned in so many ways.
This is such a creative grassroots way to revitalize a community, rewilding it and bringing back the bees, so it grows stronger for pollinators and people. Thank you, Detroit Hives, for creating such an inspiring example of what honeybee awareness and community rebuilding really means. We hope your actions inspire other communities to embrace bees and nature as our world transforms for the better.