California Area Student Bee Club
The student-led Bee Club Market is now open!
The California Area Student Bee Club Market is an entirely student-run online marketplace where students make all the products and manage the business. Bee Club students spent all winter creating products, descriptions, and labels. All purchases from the California Area Student Bee Club Market go directly to the students for supplies, educational trips, and learning opportunities. Orders placed this weekend will be filled on Thursday, April 13, 2023 during Bee Club.
Is that a drone? Are the females bigger or are the males bigger? females are worker bees and these are females but ..I think that was the queen, I think it is the queen. Dr. Jacob, So that’s the queen bee, we want to make sure she’s not only laying drones, if she only lays boys it doesn’t help us to grow this entire colony. We watch as she’s laying. She’s clearly been laying multiple weeks already which is a great sign, so she’s really active, we just want to make sure they’re just not going to be be drones.
You want to fill this up with sugar water? This is our healthiest hive without a doubt. I’ll take off the front, JACOB
I think a lot more than one died…
So let’s add sugar water, two supers, in fact we’ll put three supers in this guy, we’ll just a side note we want to put it on the concrete because what could happen is we put the queen in the grass and we never get her back. Just learn from experience. When we go to put this back, it’s this and two supers.
That’s all pollen, the pieces, you see who didn’t make it, we’re going to save all that because guess what, we can turn that into some product.
Why does it look like syrup? Do you think the hive is dead?
There was a mouse,
Been doing htis a full year, put these in last year at start of school year. So they’re one year in. Typically I thought we had half alive but we have one healthy strong hive, you typically have 44% mortality rate, we had a really good winter, it was warm so I was hoping we wouldn’t have as high a mortality rate, but it’s a good year, we have a nice healthy hive here, so they’ve gone an entire year of raising bees and getting them ready for winter. This hive alone it’ll pound out, each one of those boxes will creat 40 pounds of honey. We’ll get at least 100 pounds of honey from that hive alone this year. I was hoping to have more. We’ll save some of these, Ms. Clema will use in science classes, will put bees under microscopes so they can see it, I’ll add more nukes and we’ll start new again We got a grant to work with Bedillion Honey Farm. they let our kids come and do field trip.
Products made below, we used from our bees, added shea butter and coconut oil.
ETSY account is separate account for kids and serves as fundraiser. We earned like $400 from the ETSY shop, that’s going to give them all the supplies they need like smokers, say we need gloves, that will cover us to constantly keep doing this. It was nice over winter, each week, they can’t open the bee hives so we taught them how to make products from honey. One week they made lip balm, one week they made soap, one week they made lotion, each week did something interesting, I thought what’s cooler than having your own ETSY Shop?
It’s a club, we have kids after school from high school all the way down to kindergarten. It’s about 40 kids, I have 50 or 60 suits.
Oh, my thing is I want kids to understand how important bees are to our ecosystem and I think the kids, I had one kid say I’m not nearly as scared of bees now that I’ve been around them. I don’t went them to be scared of bees, I don’t want them using herbicides and pesticides because I want them to realize how critical it is to our food production. 80% of our food is pollinated by bees so we have to contribute to their survival, and by them doing this, I think they see that essential part. They talk about feeding the bees.
Sometimes it is fear of the unknown. We have four hives, we have them a little torn apart
TEACHER – I’m at the high school, I’m one of the …it has made me learn, and now I have my own, I have my own hives in 2017, I was going to give up, took bees out, thought they were dead, they were swarming everywhere, she explained to me they form a ball, I missed them. I’ve been telling kids at high school to get involved.
BREE – we learn about life cycles, soon, now that we’ve checked in on them, I’ll take, I have 65 kids, I’ll bring them up in groups and check the hives out, we will again make Chapstik, it’s nice to be actually able to show them the larva, we learned about it, but it’s actually nice to open up the hive and see it, it brings so much more excitement.
AUDREY and RIDLEY, fourth graders. AUBREY – reason I’m doing this is to stay over school and overcome my fear of bees, I’m doing that.
RIDLEY – this is our second time coming back out since winter and it’s fun doing outside activities and it’s fun to make something out of honey.
AUBREY – Egg, larva, pupa, adult bee….bees are very important. Grayson said they’re annoying, but they’re important.
TEACHER – if we don’t have the bees, we miss out. What are bees? They’re pollinators. All of those fruits and vegetables, they depend on those bees.
We have mobile hive we take into the kindergarten class.
37 orders, $563 but had to pay for shipping. so about $450 cleared, which honestly if we do this once or twice a year, a lot of people who have allergies like to use local honey. They go to the same flowers, they only gather pollen from the same flower until it’s exhausted, until they’ve exhausted all of the pollen, which is really genius, they’re so intelligent,
They have a 2-mile radius and use trigonometry, a bee dance, to teach other bees where to go.
GIRLS – I have my own bees. This isn’t different.
POISED GIRL – I really like it because you work outside, my friends are in here, and Dr. Jacob is really sweet. We put the bees, it give you more experience, Aleksey Cafer (?)
Bree Clema…….