Honey makes it to the home economics and sustainability classroom!

This week the students in Ms. Williams' class made some delicious looking cornbread. To make it all the tastier they included a little fresh honey from the Lab Bees. Using the schools local honey is a perfect fit for the sustainability focus that Ms. Williams brings to her class. Look for future honey use by the Home Economics and Sustainability students!

Harvest Time

One of the most enjoyable parts of Autumn is sharing the harvest with friends. This week, Ms. Mitzenmacher's 5th grade class enjoyed some time with their kindergarten buddies form Ms. Ellis and Ms. Younis' class. They used some of the Lab Honey to dip apples in! Both classes enjoyed their harvest treats.

Honey Collection!!

The summer was a good one for the Lab Bees. The workers were out there every day collecting nectar and pollen. Back in the hive they worked hard and produced a decent amount of honey. With such nice weather and good flowering times, the bees are well provisioned with honey stores for the coming winter.

But one of the great things about raising bees is that there is some extra honey that we can collect! In order to collect honey, frames - those rectangular structures the bees build their wax comb on - are removed. Any bees are brushed off and the frames are placed in a plastic box for transport.

Our bees are raised in traditional Langstroth hives and therefore equipment exists to help extract the honey.

The first step is to cut the 'caps' off the comb. The bees seal each cell up once the honey is ready. In order to do this easily a knife dipped in hot water was used. This allows the caps to be removed without damaging the cells underneath.

The second step is to place the gooey frames into the 'extractor'.  This hand powered machine spins the frames like a washing machine spins wet clothes. The honey collects in the bottom and can be removed with the yellow gate.

A strainer helps to catch bits of wax.

After the honey is strained, the sticky, golden goodness can be poured into sterile jars.























Once the honey is in jars, the empty frames can be given back to the bees to clean up. The workers will take the remaining honey back for storage leaving relatively clean frames. To do this, we simply leave the frames outside near the hives.

















So now that we have some honey, we need some reason to get it to students! So anybody with great ideas about projects or curriculum with the bees is welcome to email me (dcalleri@ucls.uchicago.edu)! The golden elixir won't last long!

Student Bee Work!!

Ms. Wagner & Ms. Kennedy's 1st Grade classroom has been hard at work exploring the wonderful world of honeybees. They made an excellent model of the structure bees build to live in and store honey, called comb. Their comb had bees of different life stages and included worker bees performing various tasks. Like good scientists they had a key explaining everything! It is wonderful to see the connection between the beehives and students at Lab. Here are some pictures of their model comb.

 An overview of the entire project. 

 They even have queen cells (larger cells hanging off the bottom)!

 The excellent key to the labels.

The queen's mating flight!

 Flowers for workers to forage at.

 The whole set up.

Various stages of larval development!

Blue Bees!

People are always asking if the bees they see belong to the Lab apiary. Now we have a chance to answer that question because this week a group of students took on the task of labeling some of our bees.

Approximately 2,500 bees were removed from one of the hives and chilled in the freezer until they became immobile. The students then quickly gave each bee a small dot of blue paint on the thorax. The bees slowly warmed up and were returned to the apiary.

The paint should last for about two weeks - so keep an eye out for our bees as you pass gardens and flowers in Hyde Park. In order to gather some data on how far from the hive the bees forage it would be great to hear about locations where people see them - we'll take the exactness of GPS or just what building or address the bees are near.

Don't forget to say hello to the blue bees!!!

Thanks to the bee labelers - Francine, Clay, Jason, Whitney, Daniel, Justin, Tom, Cat, Mr. Jones, Alex and Chevonne.

ESH 1st graders visit the apiary!

Today, two classrooms from ESH - Ms. Wagner & Ms. Kennedy and Ms. Rochester & Ms. Cincotta - visited the apiary. Ms. Wagner's class has been making an awesome bee display outside their classroom and Ms. Rochester's class has been studying insects. This makes the apiary and the garden a perfect to visit and make connections to the classroom.

It was a beautiful sunny day with blooming plants and active bees!!





The students gathered around the apiary and talked about how to behave around the bees and  used their observation skills to view the bees and the beehives.








 

The students were even able to see pollen on the back legs of bees returning to the hive.

 We also put some bees in a box so the students could observe them up close.

They students brought with them some great questions about the bees. Here are a couple of them:

We opened the hive and took out a frame of honeycomb covered with bees. The students formed a receiving line and were excited to see so many bees up close!

Then we put the frame back and the students returned to school with visions of happy bees!!

Thanks for the visit!!

And don't forget the famous monarch butterfly! The students saw some of the telltale larvae on milkweed plants!! Bonus!

 

Bees get a visit

This week the bees had a very nice visit from the 1st and 2nd grade classes from Akiba Schechter Jewish Day School. They were full of questions and got to see a frame of bees pulled from one of the hives. This gave the students a chance to see a large number bees and watch them in their home setting.

The students were also the first non-Lab recipients of some of the Lab Bees honey!! How sweet it is!

The bees send their thanks for visiting!!

Will work for honey!

Honey!!

Recently one of the hives went through spring cleaning. The different layers of the hive were separated and the comb checked for parasites or damage. There was also the removal of dead bees from the normal winter die off.

One unexpected find was several combs still full of honey!! It seems that the bees didn't eat all of their stores over the harsh winter. The frames were removed and last weekend the honey extracted. The now empty frames were placed near the hives so the bees can clean them up for reuse some time in the future.

So now for the fun part. There are 12 jars of honey that need good homes. But there not going to just anybody!! Classrooms will need to earn them - preferable with something we can share on the The Lab Bees blog.

Write stories about bees.
Do a project about bees.
Make pictures or other art projects about the bees.
Research the history of bees.
Go on a flower search and look for foraging bees.
What else can you do?!?!

We'll collect up the names of the classrooms that participate and put them in a hat to draw the lucky honey recipients! Email me at dcalleri@ucls.uchicago.edu. Good luck!

The Bees Spring Back!

You thought the winter was long?!? Think how the bees must feel. The whole colony has been confined to the hive since the day the temperature went below about 42 F. That was forever ago. So as the weather gets warmer, the bees begin to leave the hive to forage. The problem is that because the honey bees are not native to the Midwest they don't have a co-evolved relationship with the local flowers. This means that the bees are ready when the flowers are not! After long journeys looking for nectar and pollen the bees return in need of an energy boost. So how do you feed a bee anyway?

This picture answers that question. This is a feeder that gets filled with a 1:1 by mass sugar:water mixture. The bees take up the sugar water in the blue disc below the storage container. A nifty little system indeed.

The bees, as you might suspect, have the mouthparts of an animal that sucks up liquid. The image below is a nice, clear illustration of the basic parts.

The tube shaped tongue is labeled 'gls'. This image is from a website called honeybee.drawwing.org. Adam Tofilski's illustrations are well researched and communicate the beautiful structures of the honey bee.

How Honey Is Made

Having the bees in the garden has allowed several nursery, primary and lower school classes to explore the fascinating world of bees. 

Students are curious about the hives, the stings and, of course, the honey

The following is a transcript of a  conversation that occurred at the end of the bee's summer honey producing season between a class of nursery students and their teachers  Meredith, Steve & Tomoko. They had some great ideas the bees and about honey. For the best effect read in 'teacher' and 'kid' voices.

M: Now, what do we know about bees? We’ve talked about bees before.

Adrian: Sting!

M: Bees sting. Thomas?  Did you have your hand raised or are you just touching the wall?

Thomas: Bees get nectar from flowers.

M: Bees get nectar from flowers. Conrad?

Conrad: Bees die after they sting.

M: Bees die after they sting. That’s right. And Saheer.

Saheer: Well, bees make honey.

M: Bees make honey.  Do you remember we talked about last week or the week before last about how bees make honey?

Children: Yeah.

M: Did we come up with an idea about how they make honey?

Child: Sweet honey.

M: Sweet honey. Orlie?

Orlie: Umm, bees, they get the nectar from a flower then they store it in the bee hive.

M: They get the nectar from the flower. They store it in the bee hive.  Anyone else, Sophie?

Sophie: Bees I know in the store and they make bee honey for the shop and they put them in the honey bears and they buy some.

M: Okay, Mr. Steve could you bring the tray down for us please?  There’s a cycle the bees go through to make honey.  But before bees make honey they have to become a bees.  Now, this is the brood tray. These are in the apiary that the high school science teachers built with their students.  This is their hive.  Now, in the book The Bee Tree, the hive is in the bee tree and wasn’t was not made for them. They made their own bee hive.  But we have a special house for the bees and its called an apiary that I think Thomas’s mom helped build.  She helps take care of the bees.

Thomas: My mom works at the Lab School.

M: Yes, she’s a science teacher, a scientist.  So the bees, just like babies, you know we’ve been talking a lot about babies-

Thomas: Yeah, and we’re making a baby book.

M: Yes, we’re making a baby book.  The bees have to be born too, and there’s a cycle that they go through.  The queen bee lays an egg in one of these little holes. And then-  (M uses small bee toys to act out the story).

Eva: Could we act it out?

M: We could act it out. And then they grow inside until they wiggle out of the hole.  They actually eat part of their home that they’ve been growing in and when they eat part of their home it gives them strength to get out, and then they wiggle wiggle wiggle and then their wings spread.  Bzzzzz Where do you think they go?

Children: To get nectar!

M: Where do they get the nectar?

Children: From flowers!

M: Remember, we acted that out.  Adrian, you volunteered. Would you like to act it out? What would you like to be?  Are you thinking?  Would you like to act it out now or later?

Adrian: Now.

M: Now?

(Children all shout out at once “Me too”)

M: So let’s all act it out, we’ll all become bees.

(Children bend over on their hands and knees, heads to the floor. Meredith narrates the story of a bee being born and children move their bodies accordingly.)

M: The queen bee just laid an egg.

Edward: I don’t want to be a bee.

M: You can choose to not be a bee.  Now, one day passes, two days pass, three days pass, four five six seven eight nine days pass and you have been growing bigger. You were first and egg but now you’re a larvae and you’re wiggling. You’re wiggling. You have little eyes you’re starting to see some light. And then you’re a pupae.  And you kind of look like a bee that we know. One day passes in the pupae, two three four five six seven, and on the eight day you eat your way through the top and wiggle wiggle up. You put one wing out. You put the other wing out. And you’re free and you come to the flower. And I’m the flower, and then you go back to the hive and you take the pollen and you put it (Children make buzzing sounds and move to M then back to their seats) to the queen bee.  But this is all I know.  Where does the honey come from?

Children: The flowers.

M: Yes, but -

Child: They make the nectar into honey.

M: Yes, nectar into honey, but how does that happen. Let’s hear some ideas about how the nectar, the pollen, becomes honey.  Because I remmeber someone was just saying, Sophie, that we can go to the store and buy honey in honey bears just like this. But how does the honey get in here.  Mr. Steve, will you go get the special thing we have in the refrigerator?  So, we were an egg. We grew to a larvae. We became pupae.  Then we became adult bees.  We flew and got pollen. We went back to the hive, and then...

Thomas: We gave the honey to the queen.

M: (Holds up a second comb) Now, does this look about the same as this?

Children: No.

Thomas: Brown

M: One is brown and one is white.

Bryce: That one doesn’t have the nectar.

M: No, this one does, right?  This is where they were born. And this is where they find the honey. Still curious, how does it become honey? Hmmmm...

Adrian: You need to be a bee to figure it out.

M: You need to be a bee to figure it out.

Children: Yeah.

Thomas: Umm, if you get bees in your pants it could sting your legs.

M: Ouch, that reminds me. We saw your mom and Mr. Maharry, and who else did we see Mr. S?

Mr.S: Dr. Calleri

M: We saw them and what did they have on?

Thomas: Masks.

M: Their masks and their bee suits. why?

Thomas: Because then the won't get stinged. But bees went up my mom’s leg.

M: That’s right, even though they were protected, the bees went up the leg or they stung 
their hands.  Why?  Why would they sting? What were they trying to do?

Zack H: Protect their honey.

M: Yes Zack, protect their honey.  Or protect, what else?

Children: Their hives or their babies.

M: Just like our moms and dads protect us. It’s the same cycle. I do things to protect my son. But not sting.

Is it spring yet?

Another check on the hives and both have survived another whirl of the arctic vortex! In fact, there is enough sun to warm them sufficiently that some flights and housekeeping have taken place. This is a worker from hive #1 that just landed on the front of the hive.

This is a pile of dead bees just outside the lower entrance on the landing platform. The piled nature indicates that these were likely put here by workers cleaning up the interior of the hive. All social insects exhibit housekeeping behaviors that are part of their colony-level immunocompetence.

While collecting stores for the hive is some time off, when the temperature increases sufficiently the workers take full advantage to clean up and get ready for spring!

The bees survived the Polar Vortex!

Good news. Not only did we humans survive the extremely low temperatures of what has been termed "arctic turmoil", but both hives managed to weather the cold snap as well! Hurray!


But living through the cold spell doesn't mean every worker survives through to spring. Dead bees were found both below the hive entrances and further afield. Some fly out never to return and some are thrown out because they died within the hive.

What drives them to leave the hive in the middle of January? Temperature!! As long as they can fly, they will. Better to be the first hive to find the first flower then late to the party. They also have to...you know...go. Bees don't mess up their hive even when stuck inside for several weeks. So out they go. Bee poop! The image below is of bee poop on the flap to the cardboard winter covers and the second is on the snow. Another reason not to eat the yellow snow!