28 | SEPTEMBER 14 • 2023 

ROSH HASHANAH

W

ith the sweetness of Rosh 
Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, 
comes one beloved dish: apples 
and honey. It’s hard to separate the two. 
Chances are your Rosh Hashanah table has 
been adorned with a beautiful tray of sliced 
apples to dip into a bowl of honey.
While the extra sweetness symbolizes 
hope for a sweet year ahead, it’s important to 
remember the little critters that are responsi-
ble for our enjoyment of honey.
Honey is created by honeybees, who col-
lect nectar and pollen from flowers to create 
the food that they ultimately survive on (and 
allow us to savor during Rosh Hashanah).
“Honeybees go from flower to flower to 
collect the nectar and pollen to feed their 
hive,
” explains Josh Gordon, Yad Ezra’s 
Giving Gardens manager. “In 
that process, they’re bringing 
pollen to different flowers to 
help make sure those seeds are 
fruitful and fertile.
”
There may be some 20,000 
different species of bees in the 
world, but only honeybees can 
make the kind of honey that human beings 
can eat (and, they play a huge role in keep-
ing fruit and vegetable plants healthy).
Without this critical population, honey 
wouldn’t be such a sweet part of our lives 
and our holiday celebrations; yet honeybees 
are often overlooked for their role in our 
food cycle.

MAINTAINING FOOD SOURCES
Luckily, honeybees — which are native to 
Europe, are quite common in Michigan.
While honeybees are attracted to popular 
garden flowers such as black-eyed susan or 
purple coneflower, they’re also attracted to 
flowers that many people get rid of, includ-
ing dandelions and clovers — both of which 
are essential to the honeybee population.

For Adamah program director Carly 
Sugar, who has studied beekeeping and 
keeping honeybees since 2016, 
she cautions people about the 
surprising effects of removing 
these flowers (typically viewed 
as unwanted “weeds”) from 
their gardens.
“Dandelions are one of the 
earliest flowering plants and 
one of the earliest food sources for honey-
bees,
” she says, “especially after a long winter 
of depleting their stores.
”
Lawns are important to many Metro 
Detroiters, especially since we’re lucky 
enough to live in such a lush and green 
region, but conventional pesticides and 

herbicides used to treat lawns can also be 
harmful to the local honeybee population, 
Sugar explains.
Cleaning up brush and leaves, she adds, 
also removes some of the honeybees’ natural 
habitat from their food source (in addition 
to impacting other common pollinators).

THE IMPORTANCE OF GREEN SPACES
While not all Michiganders may be eager 
to give up cleaning leaves or dandelions 
from their property, there are other steps 
the Jewish community can take to support 
local honeybees. The biggest of which, Sugar 
explains, is being aware of climate change.

“One of the things I’ve been most struck 
by in the past few years is that weather 
events have become more and more intense,
” 
she says. “We think about how climate 
change is [influencing those events] and 
impacting the honeybee population.
”
For example, if there’s a drought, flowers 
that honeybees pollinate on may dry out, 
which then dries up the nectar and leaves 
honeybees without that food source for a 
week or two. Similarly, if there’s a big rain 
event with torrential downpour for days, 
honeybees aren’t able to fly and gather their 
food, causing them to eat their supply.
Sugar says that Michigan’s recently warm-
er winters also affect the honeybee popula-
tion. As these bees wake up on a particularly 
warm winter day, they may begin to eat their 
honey store, not leaving them with enough 
to make it through the rest of the cold winter 
as the deep freeze inevitably returns.
Thanks to the prevalence of orchards 
and local farms, honeybees are a common 
sight in Michigan. Many farmers also keep 
honeybees onsite to help their plants thrive. 
Yet these benefits are only possible for future 
generations if today’s generation remains 
vigilant and mindful of climate change, and 
takes steps to help reduce impact.
Planting flowering plants on your prop-
erty that honeybees are attracted to can be a 
great first step (Giving Gardens, for example, 
fills the ends of their garden beds with flow-
ers that bees are attracted to, Gordon says).
Participating in greening events (often 
hosted by Adamah) to plant more trees can 
also be highly effective in maintaining the 
green spaces that honeybees need to survive.
“Greening properties can increase the 
biodiversity of the region,
” Sugar says. “The 
more variety of plants that are growing 
in a region, the more coverage bees have 
throughout the season in terms of food 
source.
” 

Why we need honeybees to enjoy a beloved Rosh Hashanah dish.

Josh 
Gordon

Carly Sugar

ASHLEY ZLATOPOLSKY CONTRIBUTING WRITER
The Honeybee Cycle

JERRY 
NORCIA

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O C T O B E R

TWENTY NINE

D E T R O I T 

MARRIOTT

S U N D A Y 

E V E N I N G

F O R S P O N S O R S H I P S A N D R E S E RVAT I O N S 

V I S I T Y BY D I N N E R .O R G O R C A L L 2 4 8 . 6 6 3 . 8 2 9 9 

O R S C A N H E R E F O R M O R E I N F O R M AT I O N

