Service Learning Blog Post
The service-learning project that I did was the honey extraction. I did it on September 22nd from 12:30 to 3:00 so I volunteered for around two and a half hours. The event organizer was Mary Whitfield and her email is mary.whitfield@edcc.edu. The organization that sponsored this event was the beekeeping program. The goals of this event were to learn about how the bees collect and store the honey and how to extract the honey from the comb. During the project I worked on removing the wax from the comb so that we could extract the honey. We used hot knife tools to remove the wax and skimmed the top half of the comb with it to only remove the wax. Before this project I had some knowledge about bees but it was more in relation to pollination and their habitats. But I did not really know much at all about how you extract the honey. This project allowed me to have a better understanding of his topic and I was able to learn a lot about this process. It allowed me to learn about the scientific components associated with this process. It also supported the idea that it is important to work together and volunteer to help your community. Not only does it benefit yourself but the community around you. I was able to learn more from this process which benefited me and the school benefited by having help to extract the honey to sell. In this class we discussed the impacts species can have on other species and the things they can provide for them just by living their lives. Honeys provide a source of food for humans and other organisms such as bears which can be dependent on it to survive. Bees can also be considered a keystone species because so many organisms rely on them for their survival. Within this course we also learned about the waggle dance that bees do to signal the direction of food to the other bees in the hive. It connects because the dance is what allows the bees to go get food and then create the honey. So it is one of the processes that aids in the honey making process and has to take place before it is done. Overall, I really enjoyed this project and I am thankful that I had the opportunity to do it. From it I was able to learn more about the process and the things I did not know about before. In addition, I was able to also connect my experience and the things I learned back to the topics that we have discussed over the course of this quarter.
Questions:
Why is there wax on the outside of the comb?
How do they create the wax?
How could pollution effect the bees honey?
How is the comb so uniform?
Picture taken by: Samar Farange
Hi Selena! That's so cool! I tried attending honey extraction service learning but unfortunately couldn't make it. I remember learning about the Waggle dance in class. Did you get to try any of the honey?
ReplyDeleteSelena, I am happy you had the opportunity to learn first hand about the bees and the process of collecting honey. Sometimes I am amazed at how nature can create such order, such as the shape of the honeycomb, which if you think about it, is so efficient at sectional storing of the honey without much waste.
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