Long Term Project - Beekeeping - 54 hours 10 minutes
Description: Starting on September 18, 2014 and continuing to present day and beyond my long term project is to learn about beekeeping and to become a successful beekeeper through membership of the Alachua County Beekeeper's Club and by owning my own hive. This activity falls under both the active and service categories, but has been counted towards service since it is my long term project.
Reflection: The reason I chose to do beekeeping as my long term project was because I wanted to do a project that was concerned with a global issue and would help better the world in a small way. It's no mystery that the bees are dying out and without them humanity would only have four years left to live because we would run out of food. To combat this I joined the local beekeeping club in my community and since it was the fall I couldn't immediately get a hive so I spent half a year learning about beekeeping. I started from the very beginning with building my own hive, supers (which are hive boxes that you put on top of your main box for colonial expansion and come in three sizes: small, medium, and deep), and frames for the bees to build off of. Meetings were only once a month on the third Thursday so it was a long wait of anticipation for the information I wanted. How to feed your hive in the first few weeks of placement versus how to regularly feed an established hive, how to winterize your hive, how to check for mites/diseases/wax moths and other pests, how to treat your hive in case these issues arose, and many other details of information were acquired. The process of becoming more knowledgeable about beekeeping I found made me form a whole new perspective about beekeeping and bees in general. It now amazes me how complex and intelligent bees are as they are one of the few species of insect who are social and communication with one another. The fact that they has survived so long with the amount of habitat loss they have suffered from humans and with the number of factors that can kill a hive is also extremely fascinating. My mentors within the club helped me understand the importance of beekeeping and how this particular profession is keeping the United States agriculture industries afloat. I have now become more aware of the natural destruction humans have caused to Earth and how these actions have negatively impacted us whether we see it immediately or not.
My first major contribution back to the club for teaching me all that it had was to participate in an information booth at the Alachua Fall Festival where we had an observation hive for the public to view a colony at work. I manned a children's station and ran back and forth between a bean-toss station and a beeswax candle making station for four hours. It was exhausting and at the beginning I didn't really get the point of the children's section, but by the end I realized how keen it was to have a free attraction of games for the kids. The kids were first drawn in by the games, bringing with them their parents, and while I explained to them about the beeswax and they played a bee inspired game of ring toss they eventual found themselves ogling at the observation hive where the older members took over to educate and explain the importance of beekeeping. This of course was also fed on to the parents and I saw many people who became interested in beekeeping by chance. This clever tactic brought me to the sad realization of how hard it is to open people's eyes to global issues they have no clue are affecting them. Nevertheless, I found it to be a good experience.
I got my first hive of Italian honeybees on April, 5 2015 as the earliest date possible in spring to get a hive that year since we had a late coming winter. I was nervous beyond comprehension. I was afraid to get stung since I had never been stung before and the allergy is genetic within my family, and severe. I was also afraid that the bees would not take to the hive and swarm before I even had the chance to experience beekeeping firsthand. My fears were quickly put to rest, though, when my hive settled in nicely. Until the inspector came the next week and told me while my hive was doing just fine currently, it lacked a queen and if I did not re-queen it, the colony would die within a few weeks. Luckily I had learned about re-queening some months before and knew the process of it and we got a new queen for free from the hive distributor on the account that they had guaranteed a hive with a queen to begin with. The process was stressful because re-queening a hive can be dangerous in that the hive could rejected the queen and therefore kill her or the queen could reject the hive and fly off on her own. While the queen did fly off initially when I released her, she returned within the time of the day. From then on every weekend I went out to inspect my hive with the moral support of my father. The hive stayed healthy and I continued learning at the monthly meetings. Over the course of the year the colony expanded and I had to add a super to the top. Then come the fall flow of honey the hive suddenly swarmed in November, 2015. While not unusual during this timeframe, it was unfortunate because it meant my CAS project was back to being solely a learning experience instead of actually working the hive. I accepted this failure, though, and with it will work to do better next time when I get my second hive in the spring of 2016. I learned that not every project goes smoothly or even simply the way I expect it to. From a rocky start to a rocky end my first hive-keeping experience was full of experiencing and learning from my bees.
