Farmers love them because they provide agricultural pollination, they produce more than $15 billion worth of crops in the United States each year, and every third bite of food taken is in thanks to: bees. Understanding what bees provide to our ecosystem and how to promote bee and colony health while promoting human health is on Scottsdale’s agenda. “I was sitting at the kitchen table in my house on a Saturday afternoon with my wife and she looked over my shoulder into the backyard and said, ‘Wow!’ and it was like a cloud of bees in the backyard. So obviously that’s a little worrisome, right? And it seemed like they were swarming around a sage that we have in the back. It’s probably 4 or 5 feet tall,” said Ryan Johnson, commissioner of the Scottsdale Environmental Advisory Commission.