Our group has started learning about honey bees. We have a small hive box with about 30,000 bees. Our goal is to increase our pollinator garden and the number of hive boxes and honey supers for our local bee population. We have a hobby-beekeeper who is helping us learn about bees.
We are located on a USDA research facility (although no funding for this project is from them), and have a lot of space to expand our bee program and project. Our high school students are interested in creating a program and a traveling trunk for younger students to learn about bees. We know that the population of honey bees is decreasing all of the time. Since we are a STEM center with programming for school age children and community stakeholders, we are going to develop kid-friendly information to help maintain and increase the bee population in our area. We have researched the type of foliage we need to plant, the equipment needed for our project, signage we need around the property, safety precautions, and citizen science activities about bees. Our students will be completing all of these research topics and putting them into action.
