Outreach: Youth Education

As part of the blog project, I've been trying to raise awareness about bees by using some of the information I have gained to educate. Last week, I taught a 6th grade class at a local middle school in Madison, WI called Spring Harbor Middle School about bees. Spring Harbor is a public school, but it is unique in that it accepts students from all of Dane County. As a result, the student body is composed of youth with a diverse range of multi-cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. In addition, classes are small and give special attention to environmentally related issues. 

During my class, I gave a simple lecture about bees, pollination, and the negative consequences of our current agricultural systems. Reflecting on the session, the students were very engaged and seemed excited to learn about the material. If I were to do this again, I would love to take a class out to an actual hive to show them how an actual colony operates. While teaching in a class from is an important first step, fieldwork is an even more powerful way to get kids involved with sustainability. 

Adding environmental education programs to our public schools is one of the greatest things we can do to strengthen our current education system. Sustainability is a topic that can be applied to every type of work force and discussed by any type of person. Being conscious of environmental issues is important regardless of differences in cultural, economic, and political backgrounds and I think making children aware of this is extremely important. In addition, exposing children to environmental education encourages community activism. Making strong environmental education programs is not only essential for developing skills in youth, but also for promoting community engagement. Many schools want to have stronger education programs, but the lack funding to do so. That being said, many schools welcome volunteers to teach students about environmental topics. If you are interested, ask your local schools if there is anyway to get involved.

6th grade class at Spring Harbor Middle School

Bee Activist of the Day: Heather Swan

One of the goals that I have for this blog is to honor the people who dedicate themselves to bees. As I’ve mentioned before, beekeepers are fascinating people, but there are a lots of other types of people out there ranging from political activists to artists with a profound love for bees. The first person I’d like to feature is Heather Swan, my TA and inspiration for learning about bees.

As an artist, poet, gardener, baker, and teacher, bees have always played an extremely important role in Heather’s life. Heather’s love for bees began as a child when she saw her first honey harvest with her dad. Since then, bees have been an inspiration to some of the things she loves most. While Heather has kept bees before, her main focus right now is to raise consciousness about the importance of bees.  She does so through teaching, giving lectures, writing poetry, and managing community hives. I first saw Heather’s work when she took me out the UW student run hive at F.H King. Check out the photos below to see the hive:

Heather at the F.H. King Hive

Opening up the hive

Holding up a section of the hive where the bees make honey comb

Bees have an acute memory, Heather often sings and talks to the bees so that they become familiar with her and are calm when she works on the hive.

And of course, here is one of Heather's poems about bees:

The Edge of Damage

Poetry by Heather Swan

Parallel Press 2009

University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI

Cows, Rain, Bees

Once again, rain

eliminates boundaries.

Where once there was sidewalk

edged with street,

now there is only water.

In the same way, pain

can seem larger than the body,

passing through the boundaries,

emanating outward

until everything aches:

the trees, the grass,

the solitary cow

lagging behind the homeward herd,

glancing back and back

to the valley of bees.

Bees, who labor

toward a sweetness

which is taken from them

again and again,

but keep returning

from the fields of clover.

The Worker Bee

With all this talk about worker bees, I thought it might be helpful to include a diagram of what a worker bee actually looks like. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the worker bees are the ones in charge of foraging for nectar and pollen, caring for larvae, seeking out new hive environments, and general maintenance of the hive. This diagram represents a worker bee. While most of the labeled parts are pretty self-explanatory, I've highlighted a few important ones:

• Antennae: Bees have a strong sense of smell to help them seek out food sources. They use the antennae to sense these sources. In addition to dancing, bees also communicate through pheromones. The queen, workers, and drones all use pheromones to communicate with each other. Some of the pheromone functions include attracting swarms, differentiating between larvae and pupae, creating alarm, and searching for nectar.
• Proboscis: This is the tube like tongue that allows worker bees to get nectar.
• Pollen Basket: These are on the worker bees back legs. When flying from flower to flower, the worker bee collects pollen to bring back to the hive. If you look closely at the photo below, you can see the orange pollen on the worker bees that are flying back into the hive.

Check out Honey Bee Suite!

Was delighted to come across another bee blog created by beekeeper from Washington. The guy is a great writer and gives a lot of good information about honey bees, beekeeping, and pollination. The site also provides links to lots of other bee keeping blogs. I recommend checking it out!

Honey Bee Suite

It's cold season...

Yuck! Hate to say it, but it’s about that time for us to face the season of sore throats, stuffy noses, and chest colds. Winter is that season when we are constantly forced to battle off those mild, but troublesome sicknesses that can really take a toll on our daily routines. While the common cold may not be the most disasterous problem to deal with, it can interfere with our lives. The question, however, is what do we do about it? Sure, you can try to self medicate with a bunch of over the counter products from pharmacies, but thanks to bees, there is a much cheaper, effective, and healthier solution and it’s called Propolis. Propolis is a somewhat mysterious product produced by bees used by colonies to manage the structure of the hive. Bees use it to seal holes, protect against bacteria, and mummify intruders (yep, this happens quite frequently!), and we can use it to strengthen our immune systems. Propolis seems to be one of those cure all natural remedies that can be used to fight off anything ranging from sore throats to warts to canker sores. All you need to do is put it on the site of infection, or swallow a couple drops when you feel a cold coming on. Users of Propolis swear by it and I recommend trying it!

Check out Honey Garden's, a bee keeping organization in Vermont, that sells Propolis. Even if you aren't interested in buying the stuff, check out the website for more interesting facts about bees!

The Importance of Diversity

If you had to choose one, and only one, thing to eat for the rest of your life what would it be? At first, the answer to this question may come easily: just pick your favorite food. Can you imagine eating your favorite food all the time for the rest of your life? That doesn’t sound so bad. No hard decisions, no need to avoid unwanted meals, but just you and your favorite food every single day. Wait a second, every single day?  At every single meal?! For the rest of your life?!? Okay, I take it back, maybe that does sound pretty bad.

We all have that favorite food that we love, but there are few of us who would choose to eat it, and nothing else, for the rest of our lives. Not only would consuming one type of food be disgusting and repetitive, but it would also prevent us from gaining the nutritional benefits that come with a balanced diet. When it comes to food, the more diversity the better. A diverse diet ensures that one is getting enough vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats necessary to living a healthy life. This is true for all humans, and it is also true for all bees.

Bees use pollen and nectar from flowers to feed themselves and the hive. Nectar provides bees with carbohydrates, while pollen is a source of proteins and fats. The worker bees eat these plant parts while they are at the flower, but they also bring them back to the hive to make the three foods crucial to bee life: honey, bee bread, and royal jelly. Honey, which we all know and love, is the distilled nectar stored in the hive to feed the queen, drones, and young worker bees and sustain the hive during seasons when food sources are unavailable. Beebread is stored pollen that provides bees with proteins, lipids, nitrogen, and amino acids. Lastly, royal jelly is the substance made by young worker bees to feed hungry larvae. The combination of these three types of food keeps a healthy hive buzzing.  (Buchmann)

While the three food sources provide bees with the basics, it is important that they do not all come from the same type of flower. Like us, bees need to eat a balanced diet. And since they only consume nectar, pollen, and honey, this diversity needs to come from the original feeding source—the flower. Getting food from different kinds of flowers provides bees with lots of nutritional values leading to benefits like enhanced immune systems. Bees only visit one type of flower for an extended period of time (allowing for pollination of each species!), but the type of plant shifts throughout a season. For example, a colony may take nectar only from Dandelions in early spring and then transition to Goldenrods later in the season. This feeding mechanism not only ensures that multiple types of plants are pollinated, but also guarantees that bees receive benefits from a range of pollens and nectars. Each plant species’ pollen is composed of a unique composition of proteins and amino acids. By using pollen that comes from different plants, the bees are rewarded with a multitude of amino acids and proteins thus contributing the vitality of the entire colony.

One of the problems our current ecosystems face is a decline of biodiversity. As our natural environments shrink and our meadows and forests are converted into mono-crops, many species, especially bees, face a shortage of food and nutrients. Bees can still obtain food from a limited amount of plant species, but it is probably not the healthiest way for hives to do so. Instead of living in environments filled with many different plant species, bees used for commercial honey production are now trucked from mono-crop to mono-crop with an expectation to pollinate entire fields and provide us with enough honey for human consumption. For example, a single hive may move from pollinating a peach orchard in Vermont to an almond grove in California within a matter of a couple weeks. This not only limits the types of flowers bees can visit during nectar collecting seasons, but also puts an incredible amount of stress on colonies. This is a lot to ask of bees, and we are experiencing the consequences of it through problems like Colony Collapse Disorder.

While bees play an essential role in pollinating our crops, it is unwise for us to simply see bees as tools rather than as a species. When we think of Honey Bees as tools to pollinate, we forget that they are living creatures with needs of their own. By doing so, we fail to remember that like us, bees need a diet composed of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates from a wide range of plant sources to ensure that they are getting enough nutrients and health benefits to sustain their colonies. If we want to rely on bees to pollinate our crops, we need to do so in a way that is best suited for the bees. With the way our population is growing and our current food system is set up, it may be unreasonable to provide a way for all bees to live the best possible lives, but we can try our best to form ideal environments for many more bee colonies than we do now. Over thirty percent of the world’s hives collapse on an annual basis. If we continue to treat bees the way that we do this number will most likely increase.

There are many ways that we can help bees, but one of the most important things that we can do is reestablish the ecosystems that bees rely on to survive. This means we need to protect our meadows, forests, and poly-culture farms. Even a simple act such as planting a small pot of wildflowers in an outdoor window box provides bees with a healthy feeding source. We can save the world’s bee colonies, but we can only do so if we give them a place to live. This is where we need to start.

Cited Sources:

Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind.New York: Bantam, 2005. Print

We’re eating honey that isn’t actually honey?

Ever think that the honey you see in most grocery stores isn’t actually honey? Probably not because, well, why would you? The bottle this mysterious substance is in claims that it’s honey. It smells like honey, looks like honey, and tastes (somewhat) like honey, but we now know that it’s not. After a series of tests ran by the World Health Organization, results have proven that over three-fourths of honey sold in American grocery stores is not normal honey, but instead a pollen-less substance that could be dangerous to our health and even fatal. While researchers are unsure as to why most honey in grocery stores shows no sign of pollen, many believe that it is because the honey is either actually diluted by other sugars, or ultra-filtered to cover up a deeper problem. If you are interested in learning more about the consequences of consuming this kind of honey, please check out the article below published in Food Safety News.

Food Safety News: Contaminated Honey