Bees and Beekeeping

at Green Adventures Camp, 2011

Green Adventures Camp established our first hive at Raynor's farm in the spring of 2009. This summer we have 3 working colonies of honey bees, Apis mellifera, that were introduced in mid May, after winter losses of all of last year's bees. The bees came from Georgia as 5 pound "package" bees , each with a new queen. The queen was marked with a deep blue spot on her thorax. This is actually last year's color code for queens, but was the pen I had when the bees came to town.

Each week campers have the experience of suiting up and examining what is going on in the hives. The bee protective clothing and the first hive set up are thanks to grants from the EPA, 2008,(for new teacher-Beekeepers) and the Ann Arbor Public Schools Educational Foundation. Educator, Beekeeper, Naturalist- Jane Levy

	We start with a lesson on "How to NOT get Stung by honey bees".
	These pictures are from June 30th, Week One.

    During Week 2 of Camp, we learned a lot about bees, including what is going on inside and outside the hive, the honey bee's anatomy and life cycle, and different "jobs" that bees take on during their life. We also studied flowers and why pollination is the most important job that the bees do.

Bee and Flower Anatomy	Sipping Nectar
	Nurse bees feeding the larvae!

Thursday afternoon we visited the hives again!

	Lighting the smoker.

 Week three's visit to the Apiary:

As of July 14th, all three of the hives are busy collecting nectar and pollen, making honey and there is evidence that the queen in each hive is laying - multiple frames with brood, both larvae and pupae. We have not taken away any honey. Each hive has 2 supers on top, with drawn comb and some frames where bees are drawing out the comb. There is evidence that they are starting to deposit honey/nectar in some but no capped honey at that level as yet. We have found a few full deep frames of honey in the hive body, but are not removing it now.

The third week of July it was too hot to go to the apiary, so we left the bees alone for the week.

On July 28th, we again went to Raynor's farm, suited up a new group of campers and inspected our hives. The bees are now clearly storing honey in the supers. We found lots of wet cells, some frames with half the cells capped (finished honey!). There are still a good proportion of brood cells with larvae and pupae, so although we didn't put eyes on the queen, we know she is working!

Of course, we always start with the bee safety lesson.

On Week six, we visited the farm on Wednesday, Aug. 3rd. It was a cloudy, wet day and not a good time to open the hives for inspection by a large group of campers. We talked about how the bees came in packages from Georgia and watched for a while to see if they were foraging. When the campers weren't near, Jane went into the top of one hive and pulled out six frames of honey for extraction the next day.

On August 11, we visited the Apiary with a purpose in mind - it was time to take some honey off the hives! 3 groups of campers helped to remove as many full frames of honey from the suppers as we could get. We brought back to Lakewood 20 frames of honey, replacing them with new frames with foundation. On Friday morning, the campers worked to extract about 40 pounds of honey from the frames. It was bottled and is being sold. The money will be used to maintain equipment, live bees and other start-up costs for next years honey harvest!

	We had some campers who very proudly walked away after suiting up and visiting 50,000 of our closest bee friends, despite being frightened by the whole idea of the bees. Bravo! Would you be brave enough to do this?

On August 18th,Green Adventures Camper visited the Apiary for the last trip this summer. We were able to pull off another 7 frames of honey (about 20 pounds) that will be given to staff as a bee thank you. And the award for bravest, calmest camper goes to Alex, who noticed that a worker bee had gotten just inside the front zipper of his bee protective suit. He calmly held the suit away from his chest while we were able to free the little girl to go back to her work. Great job!

	Thanks bees for a Sweet Summer!

It is now mid October and we have just removed all the supers off of our 3 hives. The extracted honey was bottled and we now have another 60 pounds of honey from our bees!