Beekeeping a big success at St. Louis

Beekeeping a big success at St. Louis Living Arts School
Posted on 09/16/2021
This is the image for the news article titled Beekeeping a big success at St. Louis Living Arts SchoolTwo Kindergarten students help turn the honey extraction machine.

Students at St. Louis Living Arts School were buzzing with excitement this week as the culmination of the Beekeeping Workshops saw them extracting honey. Every student in the school was given the opportunity to help beekeepers and mentors Garry Wiebe and Ingrid Braun extract the honey from the racks of the school’s two hives.

Grade by Grade students were invited to the gym to help with the process which began with brushing the wax caps off the frames and then putting the racks in the extraction machine. Students then  turned the handle to spin the machine fast enough so that Centrifugal force would draw the honey out of the racks. The honey then pooled at the bottom and dripped out into a waiting sieve and bucket.

Nash Olson has fun pulling out a rack from one of the bee hivesExtracting the honey was the big finale to what has been a successful beekeeping season for St. Louis Living Arts School.

“Everybody’s been really interested. Some are a little bit timid, but overall, the whole picture has been really good!” said Wiebe.

Over the summer both Wiebe and Braun led workshops that families of St. Louis students could sign up for. Wiebe spoke more about his involvement with the program.

“I sold two immature hives to the school back in the spring. I also helped them set up a bear proof compound and then between Ingrid and I we’ve been taking turns doing inspections with the families,” said Wiebe. “Some of the kids were fortunate enough to pull frames and we just gave them a basic overview of what was involved with keeping bees.”

Grade 5 student Nash Olson took part in the workshops and spoke about his experience.

“We would take out all the racks where the honey is and look for the queen bee. My favourite part was the suits, they were cool,” he said.

A child helps Garry Wiebe comb the racks.Wiebe said his hope is that moving forward St. Louis Living Arts School will be able to keep their own bees without any help.

“It is my true desire that the school succeeds in this project by managing their own hives themselves. I’d like to see them be on their own with no mentoring and have a successful honey crop every year, see the bees winter successfully and just learn proper management,” he said.

Olson explains what he found interesting to learn about during the workshops.

“I learned that for [the Queen] bee there’s different colour dots on their backs for different years,” he said.

It’s common practice in beekeeping communities to paint a dot on the queen bee’s back with a certain colour to indicate what year they were introduced to the hive. This helps keep track of how long the queen has been with that hive and also makes it easier to spot the queen amongst what can be hundreds of worker bees.

Now that the honey has been extracted the school will move forward with getting the bees ready for winter which involves wrapping them up under a bee cozy and then periodically checking on them throughout the cold months. But in the meantime, everyone is looking forward to tasting the honey!

Garry Wiebe and Ingrid Braun pour the honey into the bucket,

Ingrid Braun helps a student comb the honey racks.
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