Service Learning Honey Extraction

Honey Extraction

The service learning event I participated in was the honey extraction. This event was 2 ½ hours and was run by Mary Whitfield and the bee club on campus! Her email is mary.whitfield@edcc.edu. The purpose was to educate students about how to extract honey, and how to get the most honey as possible. It also taught me quite a bit about beekeeping and how the modern bee keeping frames work. At the event, I was able to use hot tools to extract honey. That was a neat experience, because had extracted honey a couple times before, but I had only ever used am uncapping fork. I participated in the spinning of the frames in the honey extractor itself. I even got to take my own little jar of honey home with me!

This event taught me a lot about bees, and about our local community. I had no idea before participating in this event that we had a bee club on campus, and I had no idea that EDCC keeps bees in the garden! It’s so great to learn that people care so much about saving the bees. I also learned about how planting different species of flowers on campus would bee beneficial to helping their survival and their pollination process. In this class, we have learned a lot about endangered species and what that means in terms of how it could affect ecosystems and even how it could affect the world economically. I learned that the major reasons for the scary decline of bees is pesticides and parasites. Without bees, life as we know it could completely change. The survival of many plants we know and enjoy are thanks to the work of bees, helping them reproduce. Many animal species also depend on those plants as a source of food. If the decline of the honey bee population continues, we would see a huge economic impact. This is a great example of how ecology is interdisciplinary, as it shows just how connected nature is with everything. I hope to keep bees someday and keep expanding my knowledge on the subject.

(I can't find the pictures I took at the event so here's a picture of my cute little honey jar!)

Questions:

Besides keeping bees, what can be done on a smaller scale to help save them?

If the number of bees keeps declining, what other species are going to take the hardest hit?

What makes the PNW such a great place to keep bees?

What determines what kind of honey the bees make? (Seasons? Plant availability? Etc.)

Source:

https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/bee-extinction-means-end-humanity.html