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.
“The bees pollinate those fruits and flowers so you get a bigger yield, if we didn’t have the pollinating services, we just wouldn’t have as much as we have,” said David Mullins, owner of Bee Great and prolific beekeeper in northeast Indiana.
“Bees are integral to the environmental ecosystem in Fort Wayne and their importance reaches beyond our borders”
— ORDINANCE G-23-07-03R
Fort Wayne City Council has acknowledged their importance with an ordinance aimed at allowing beekeepers — properly known as apiarists — to have additional hives in city limits.
WHEREAS, bees are integral to the environmental ecosystem 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…
A SECTION OF ORDINANCE G-23-07-03
If the ordinance is passed, the current limit of two beehives per property within the city will be expanded greatly depending on property size.
- Two (2) hives for properties that are up to 6,000 square feet
- Four (4) hives for properties that are between 6,000 and 16,000 square feet
- Six (6) hives for properties that are between 16,000 and 25,000 square feet
- Eight (8) hives for properties that are greater than 25,000 square feet
And not only does that mean more honey for the urban beekeeper, but it also translates to environmental impact.
“Each hive you’re hoping for a five-gallon bucket off each one, that’s about 60 pounds so if you have 8 hives versus 2 hives you’ll get that many more buckets of honey,” Mullins said. “One of the reasons that people want to have bees is not so much for the honey, it’s because they want to pollinate their garden, they want their fruit trees to grow, they want their flower to be bigger and honeybees help with all of that.”
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’s decision.
“I think there are some restrictions now where people feel they can’t have as many colonies as they would like to have,” Mullins said.
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.
“If you have two hives you can pull frames from bees and move them into the other… if they are two weak colonies going into the winter, both of them you are likely to lose all your bees,” Mullins said. “So if you have four hives or eight hives, you have that many more resources to make sure the colonies are strong.”
