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Beekeeping classes at Beeston school
Beekeeping, a centuries-old profession, is proving hugely popular among the students at Cockburn College of Arts in Beeston.
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Kath Clarke, the school's creative arts facilitator, has helped Cockburn wing its way towards setting up its very own apiary, or home for bees.
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The apiary, in a quadrant at the heart of the school building, houses a hive containing a staggering 60,000 bees.
Pupils volunteer to get involved with the beekeeping, and do so in their own time, but the skill is proving so popular and successful school leaders are considering extending it to citizenship lessons.
Kath said that as well as getting the pupils interested in biology and the natural world, beekeeping is helping to spark their potential as young entrepreneurs.
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She explained: "We have a social enterprise company in school called The Glass Room, which makes fused glass products.
"It is run by the pupils and makes a good profit, 6,000 last year, with the money going back into the school, helping to fund new
enterprise projects.
"Once our bees have had a year to establish themselves the idea is to make and sell honey and honey-based products, like polish and lip-balm.
"It will teach the kids where those products come from but also give them a good grounding in how businesses are run.
"The Glass Room will be a good guide for what we do with the honey, as it has won three awards for social enterprise, one of them a prize at a
FTSE 100 index trade fair in York."
Kath laughed that the beekeeping idea "came from nowhere."
"I am a bit of a serial hobbyist," she said. "I was browsing the
internet, saw a course being run by Leeds beekeepers and signed up to it.
"Then I spoke to the head and asked to bring bees into school. He was shocked at first, to put it one way, but then he said 'OK'."
The apiary is in a small, brick-walled quadrant, the hive behind a gated, wooden partition.
On the other side of the partition is what will soon be a house for some school hens, on the wall a plaque in tribute to Gemma Carter, a Cockburn pupil who died a tragically early death in 1999.
Preparing to enter the apiary, by donning the traditional beekeeping overalls and webbed hat, were pupils Alex Pickles and Connor Duncan. Connor, 14, said he got involved after spotting the hive as he walked around the school, and so approached Kath.
He said: "As soon as I saw it I wanted to know more, I thought it would be a fantastic way to expand my knowledge and to learn about something completely new to me.
"Kath gave me the opportunity to do it and I have been learning more and more as we have gone on.
"It is fun, but it is great for education as well. I want go on and learn a lot more about beekeeping, it is something I have got really interested in."
Alex, 15, said he had a few nerves the first time he ventured into the apiary.
"My confidence is building up now though," he said. "I watched and listened to Kath and I am picking it up, I love it. It is teaching me about wildlife and about how important bees are to us."
Not wanting to stand on the sidelines, Beeston Today got kitted out and joined pupils and instructor inside the bees' territory.
The two boys looked every inch the professional as they used the bellows to blow smoke at the bees, encouraging them to go back inside their hive.
"The smoke makes them think there is a fire, so they go back in and start gorging on the honey," Kath explained.
When the bulk of the colony were safely inside, Kath lifted off the lid to lift out one of the heavy, honey-packed panels.
As she did so, the apiary was filled with the incredibly-loud sound of tens of thousands of busy, buzzing bees.
The noise was so loud, the five people near the hive had to raise their voices to be heard clearly.
For the nervous, it would raise fears of being chased by a swarm, but, Kath said, stings are rare if beekeepers go about their business sensibly.
She said: "I've had one or two, but they don't want to sting you. The trick is to stay away on cold or wet days, the bees don't want to know then, but if the weather is good the bees' moods should be too."
While the beekeeping team worked, Cockburn pupils began moving between classes and a crowd gathered at the apiary windows.
To the backdrop of more than 20 fascinated children, squeezing themselves up against the glass to watch, mouths agape, Kath told of the efficiency governing way bees live their lives.
She said there is room for only one queen in a hive, who will lay about 2,000 eggs a day.
The females are the worker bees, she said, with up to 20,000 of them out foraging for pollen at any one time.
Such foraging missions prove exhausting, limiting the life of a busy worker bee to about three weeks. Other female duties include guarding the entrance to the hive from wasps or rival bees and clearing out the cells for eggs to be laid. The male drones, on the other hand, have a less active role.
"They don't do a lot really," Kath smiled. "They are quite lazy, their purpose is to mate with the queen, then at the end of the summer the workers kick them out of the hive to die. They would be taking up valuable space otherwise."
Kath said the value of bees to our planet, and, on a smaller scale, our children's education, can be summed up in one quote from the legendary Albert Einstein.
She added: "He got it spot on. He said that if bees disappeared from the surface of the globe, man would have four years left to live.
That's because without bees there is no pollination, with pollination there are no plants, without plants there are no animals and then there are no people."
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Weather for Leeds
Friday 18 May 2012
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