Giving Compass' Take:

• Urban beekeepers are finding that cities may play in an important role in restoring honeybee habitats and that human communities may benefit from their company. Because of this, companies are now providing native wildflower waystations for bees or "bee highways," writes The New Food Economy.

• Can this level of urban farming be applied to other insect life or animals that are usually considered rural? What does this tell us about the balance of our ecosystem?

• Here's more on the growing field of urban farming and how it can transform cities.

When Brian Peterson-Roest decided to leave suburban Lake Orion, Michigan, he thought his beekeeping days were numbered. He was moving to Detroit. Who had ever heard of keeping bees in a city?

But his thinking changed on a trip to New York City, where saw hives of bees living in harmony with passersby in Manhattan’s Battery Park.

“I was like, why can’t I do bees in the city?” he says. “There’s so many green spaces and urban gardens and parks and abandoned lots in Detroit compared to most large cities. It just made sense.”

Two years after moving, in 2016, Peterson-Roest started keeping bees on the rooftops of friends’ businesses in Detroit. That year, he and his husband—who is also named Brian, though his last name is Roest-Peterson—co-founded Bees in the D, a nonprofit that promotes honeybee health and education. Today, Bees in the D manages 50 hives in the core of the city.

Read the full article on urban bee farming by Adina Solomon at The New Food Economy.