Puttin’ a lid on it.
Earlier this year I signed on with the St Helena Montessori School to work with their adolescent program teaching the occupation of beekeeping. It has been a interesting experience and rather eye opening for me as an instructor.
You see, when I first started out teaching I was disillusioned by the idea that I thought I would be only instructing at university level. As time went on and I experienced not only instruction at the university level but at the community college as well. I realized teaching at any stage be it the four year college or 13th grade it didn’t matter too much. The kids were the most important thing and I found it easy to connect at any level. I also had this notion that there was no way I’d ever teach high school either. The Montessori kids taught me otherwise, I really enjoy teaching any age. I have met some astonishing people teaching at some pretty incredible places.
The Montessori is really working hard to create a learning facility that will teach kids K-12 the importance of agriculture, community, and in my case beekeeping. The nice thing is that the Montessori already owns the property where the school will be so we have been keeping bees at the site for about two years with Nimbus Arts. We started off with only a handful of colonies that I was using as educational hives for the hands-on portion of the Nimbus classes but have since grown to about 15 hives. In many ways the College Ave. site has developed into an SBCA for wayward bees. Inevitably some beekeepers need a place to keep their bees and the College Ave site has turned out to be a wonderful communal apiary. As an instructor it is so much fun to meet students, past students, or anyone who is interested in bees out at the bee yard and work bees collectively. In the past 6 months since the Montessori adolescents have gotten more involved the grounds have improved immensely. This year with the help of Peter White we put in a cover crop that the bees will die for this spring. Peter also helped orchestrate putting a paved road out to the apiary and kids garden that allows us to work all year round w/o getting stuck in the mud. At the end of the roadway there is a 30x30 slab,we will eventually build a structure with an awning where we can store equipment, teach classes in an open air setting, and provide a shade area for the bees. For the last couple of weeks Peter and I have been building one of Serge Labesque’s hive storage units. We not only doubled Serge’s plans but we did some modifications to the ceiling. It took a little more work but we made a pitched roof out of reclaimed corrugated tin that looks absolutely stunning. Today I went out in the rain and put the capping on as the finishing touch. It is so exciting to have a place to store all the hive bodies, suppers, and drawn comb. Serge’s design is very well thought-out, cheap, and incredibly easy to put together. We built a double wide version for about $2 hundie. Mind you, that was scrounging for wood and corrugated. but that’s what made it fun and look so uber-chic not blindingly shiny new. I highly suggest to anyone that has a bunch of wooden ware they need to store, especially if there is drawn comb involved, to look into this system. At some point I’d like to up-load and post Serge’s plans but I guess there is some sort of legal red tape preventing that because the plans once ran in Bee Culture magazine. You heard it here first!
A lot of green
A lot of grey
Hello,
The plans for Serge's shelter belong to Serge, not to Bee Culture magazine. We did publish them, but once we publish as article the rights to that article revert back to the author, so we have no say in how they are used. If Serge is willing, I would imagine it would be just fine to post them. It is a grand design, and I found it so well done that I asked Serge if I could use it in my book, The BackYard Beekeeper.
Posted by: Kim Flottum | December 22, 2008 at 12:19 PM