I’ve been living right here for 15 years, there’s 8 acres and I garden. I’d be out here mowing these 8 acres and at the end of the summer I would say man I’m out here in the country, I don’t think I’ve seen a dozen honeybees all summer long. So I started looking into honey bees and I found out we had a problem. We don’t have honeybees like we used to. We have problems with pesticides and diseases and lack of forage. So I spent all of that year and into that winter studying honey bees and I got my first hive of bees and places them right there years ago. From there on I became a beekeeper. The more I’ve done this, I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t care about the honey and I still do some pollination but I enjoy beekeeping so I became a counter apiary inspector for the Ohio department of agriculture. This is the good stuff, this is what I like to look at. This is nectar. The inspector program here in Ohio was started around, I believe 1904. And it was started for the purpose of trying to prevent the spread of diseases, the worst one being American Foul-brewed. American Foul-brewed can wipe out your own hives, it can spread to every hive in the area. So it’s all about inspecting for diseases. So I go through the counties that I inspect and know that I’m looking for diseases and pests to keep from spreading. Without inspectors, diseases and pests are left out here unchecked, so we have to have inspectors out here just to ensure the health of these colonies out here because they are so important not necessarily for honey but for pollination. Here in the state of Ohio and everywhere else.” We then hear Mike begin talking about a marked queen bee while he is smoking a hive. He finds the queen and then exclaims “There she is!” We see a CU shot of the marked queen. Mike begins talking again and says “Honeybees are only important as long as you like to eat, now if you don’t like to eat then I guess honeybees aren’t important at all. Honeybees are responsible for 1/3rd of the food you eat. They pollinate all of your fruits a lot of your vegetables. I don’t care if your 10 years old or 80 years old, seek out your local bee club, go to a meeting. There’s where your wealth of information is. There all over the state of Ohio, there’s probably about every 40 miles or so there will be a beekeeping club in this area. Some day I’ll be too old to be a beekeeper. I won’t be able to physically do this anymore, but I’ll still like to eat strawberries, and what I want is these kids out here, if I could talk to 30 kids and just 1 of them becomes a beekeeper that one kid goes on to have honeybees to pollinate the strawberries that I’ll still like to eat when I can no longer be a beekeeper. So pollination is the most important job of a honeybee