Service Learning Blog Post

The event that I attended for my service learning requirement was the honey extraction in the beginning of the quarter. I volunteered for about two hours during this service. The name of the organizer of the event was Mary Whitfield, and her email for verification is mary.whitfield@edcc.edu.   This activity was sponsored by the beekeeping program and had a goal of extracting the honey, of the beehives located on campus, from its comb by using a tool known as a centrifuge. The purpose of this  activity was to be informed on the way in which bees collect and then store the honey they produce, as well as learning the steps that it takes in order to remove the honey from its comb. Some of the tasks that were available for us to participate in during this event were separating the light honey from the dark, removing the wax coating holding in the honey, and the other task was to spin the centrifuge to get the honey to flow out and into a bucket. The task that I was working on consisted of removing the wax that covered the honey. We used a hot scraping tool that would melt the wax and scrape it off. 

Picture Credit: Selena LeBlanc

This experience affected me greatly because it gave me a greater perspective and opened my eyes to how they produce such a product that we consume so much of. Before this event, I never knew the process of how honey was produced and removed from the comb for human consumption. The great thing that I found with this experience was that I got to learn about an everyday product that I do not think many people know or think about how it is provided to them. The connection between this and the scientific side to the bee and the product they produce gave me a greater amount of knowledge in this topic. This experience also affected how I further feel regarding providing services to my community. Before this, I have participated in only a handful of volunteer and community work because I never enjoyed them and always felt like they were more of a chore I had to accomplish. Though after finding out about this opportunity and completing it, I found that there are many events that are held that could possibly actually interest me and that I would want to help more often with around my community, which I think is a very beneficial thing to do. This service learning activity related heavily to our class because of our discussions regarding the importance of species and organisms relying upon one another. If it were not for plants and flowers, the bees would not be able to create the honey that we ended up extracting, and if it weren't for the bees, the flowers and plants would never be pollinated. This just goes to show how much everything in the world connects whether its in nature or with us, humans. Overall, this experience gave me a better insight and knowledge into the connections between plants and animals, and how without them such event would not even occur because they would never work to create the honey that we then extract, package, and sell as humans. 

1. What is the layer of wax made of?

2. How is the comb made?

3. What happens when all the honeycomb is filled and it does not get removed to be extracted?

4. How often do the bees produce honey and the combs need to be extracted?