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• MOOS FROM THE FARM is a Registered Service Mark of Farms For City Kids Foundation, Inc.• FARMS FOR CITY KIDS & DESIGN is a Registered Service Mark of Farms For City Kids Foundation, Inc. • Farms For City Kids is a 501(C)3 non-profit foundation • © 2012 Farms For City Kids Foundation, Inc.

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2013 Spring Newsletter

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FARM

®

Of Hands-On Learning!Understanding by doing... Discovering by experiencing... Beyond the school walls Farms For City Kids opens up a memorable and life changing world through hands-on learning activities that not only bring classroom studies to life but importantly encourage students to question how the everyday items in their lives actually come to be. Our Lessons for a Lifetime® program, along with Mother Nature, help our students to answer many of their “Oh, that’s how that happens” questions.

Throughout the four seasons at the Farm our students realize that “at the store” is no longer the answer to questions about where some of their food comes from as we peak their inquisitiveness by immersing them in the hands-on activities of making apple cider in the Fall, producing maple syrup in the winter and assisting in the cheesemaking process in the Spring. And new for 2012! Now one of the sweetest and most insightful lessons occurs when our students go to the garden in the summer and visit our Farms For City Kids bee colonies.

At the first mention of bees, most people think of stings and angry swarms of buzzing insects. However, honey bees are actually less aggressive than the predatory wasps and hornets. They typically attack only in response to a serious threat as stinging may mean the end of a bee’s life. But, thank goodness, most often when we think about bees what comes to mind is the reward of fresh, naturally sweet Honey!

And honey is truly just the beginning of the sweet rewards we can thank these incredible bees for. Often overlooked is the many fruits and vegetables we eat that would not be possible without bees. The USDA lists 50 species of seed or fruit producing-crops that are dependent on insects for pollination. Included in the list are favorites such as apples, artichokes, asparagus, blackberries, blueberries, cherries, citrus fruits, cucumbers, cranberries, pears, peaches, plums, pumpkins, raspberries, squashes, sunflowers and many varieties of seeds, nuts and spices.

From a farmer’s perspective it is easy to see why bees are such a valuable and necessary resource.

info@farmsforcitykids.orgfarmsforcitykids.org

TheSweetRewards...

Nectar is collected from flowers and returned to the hive where it is stored in the combs. The bees will actually fan the nectar stores with their wings to aid in evaporating water from the nectar. The end result is honey. Bees will also collect pollen from pollen producing plants and bring it back to the hive where it too is stored as food. The nurse bees mix pollen and honey together to feed developing larva (often called bee bread).

The foraging bees are able to communicate to other bees in the colony the location of a water or food source by dancing. One of the first to study and decode this dance was Karl von Frisch. Basically, by using the sun and other geographical land marks, bees can communicate by the ‘waggle dance’ or the ‘circle dance’. The circle dance will tell members of the colony that a source is in

close proximity of the hive. However, they are left to find the source on their own. The waggle dance is much more

detailed and is capable of relaying the distance needed to travel and direction of travel.

Consider that it “takes about 20,000 bees to bring in a pound of nectar, which will make about one-fourth as

much honey. It would, therefore, take 80,000 bees to bring in four pounds of nectar and modify it to equal one

single pound of honey.” 1

Are we really going to see bees?!The jittery fears and skeptical thoughts that follow the students through the first tours of the barns also accompany their minds when they visit the garden bee colonies. City kids by nature have a distaste for bugs, but stinging bugs and spiders are tops on the list! Automatically every child believes they are allergic and that the bees will swarm and sting them just for coming to the garden. But careful explanation of how the bees’ defense mechanisms work, and what they will actually react to, enables curious students to say ‘lets go and see the colonies’.

One important note for our readers as we introduce you to our bee workshop: It is always our students’ choice to visit any colony or bee workshop. The utmost care is taken to explain before hand how to behave when in close proximity to the colonies and colonies are visited only on days indicative to friendly bee behavior. We are very happy to say that no students or teachers were stung throughout the entire 2012 season while visiting the colonies, holding bees, or conducting or recreating any bee experiment.

For more information, please contact: Rob Macri, Educational Director 802.484.5822 or Alida Curcio, Chief Development Officer 516.767.5757 info@farmsforcitykids.org

And so our students learn how smart and incredible bees are. They discover their importance

to some of our most delicious food sources. Now, pollination is more than simply a word - it’s

truly a visible process. The bee’s intricate life cycle and each bee’s responsibility to ensure

a thriving colony is no longer a concept but a real experience in our

Lessons for a Lifetime® program.

Most importantly, the typical bee colony exemplifies teamwork, as each bee is busy achieving a

common goal: colony survival and propagation. Without teamwork, the world’s food source would not be as plentiful and our earth would not be as beautiful. And this lesson of teamwork is not

lost on today’s students. They approach their week helping to run Spring Brook Farm with a deeper

understanding that each of them has a unique role in ensuring a week of productivity and success.

They are truly the busiest of bees at the Farm!

How do they do it?If you’ve ever had the chance to get a close up look at a bee colony, you would see a tiny city of 50,000+ individuals living and working together with one goal: to provide enough food and resources for the next generation and survival of the colony. And the best way to understand just how hard bees work is to introduce you to the members of the colony and their life cycle.

The queen, as she is known, is the mother of the colony. A queen hatches from her egg and develops into an adult in 16 days. She may live up to four years, never leaving the hive unless it “swarms”, which happens as the direct result of an overpopulated colony. She does

not rule the hive or order around the other bees. She lays eggs in order to ensure healthy numbers of bees in the colony. The fertilized eggs become future generations of worker bees, the unfertilized eggs become future drones.

All worker bees are female bees and emerge as a mature worker in 21 days. The worker bee has many responsibilities, such as house bee, nurse bee, field or forager bee and guard bee. The responsibility changes as the bee gets older. During the height of the growing season, a worker bee may live to six weeks. They literally work themselves to death gathering food and water for the survival of the colony. The worker bee cannot lay fertilized eggs, however, she can lay eggs, which develop into drones.

The drones are male bees and lack the body parts necessary to gather nectar, pollen, propolis or water. Their only responsibility is to mate with a queen when she takes her maiden flight from the hive.

What do bees do all day?Bees are very busy insects and that’s where the term ‘busy as a bee’ comes from. Foraging bees can travel up to five miles from the hive in search of food (pollen and nectar), water and propolis, the sticky sap of plants and trees that is used as glue and as a coating for inside the hive. This propolis is said to have antibacterial qualities and is used as such in homeopathy remedies for colds and other illnesses.

Amazing, productive bees!The educational benefits of incorporating the bee colonies into our Lessons for a Lifetime® program are many. The obvious is pollination, hence the location of two colonies near the kids’ garden and apple orchard. Once at the colony, the kids watch bees exiting at a dizzying rate of speed, usually in two or three main flight paths. The returning bees can often be observed entering the hive with pollen clinging to their legs,

only to pass along the precious cargo to the house bees and return to foraging. The children begin to relax and ask questions: “What are the yellow balls on the legs?” Pollen “How can you tell males from the females?” Males have larger eyes closer together, bigger fatter bodies and it sounds like they are working harder to fly than female bees.

These same bees work their magic on the apple blossoms and various garden plants. Exercises allow the students to observe the bees on the flower, and then after the bee departs, they place a plastic bottle over the flower. A properly pollinated flower will be seen by future students as ‘fruit in the bottle’ come harvest time.

Many schools come to Spring Brook Farm with a learning objective of studying life cycles. The more first hand opportunities we can provide to demonstrate these cycles the better. As the children sit and watch the flight paths of in-coming and out-going bees, they realize there are A LOT OF BEES associated with the colony. And they have learned the many different jobs bees do.

Eventually the question comes “Can I see the queen?” The children are then asked to remain sitting calmly on a blanket and to expect that bees WILL fly about their heads, maybe even land on them. What they should never do is wave hands about their heads trying to shoo them off. If they decide they no longer wish to observe,

they may calmly stand up and just walk away.

With the kids sitting, and a healthy dose of smoke to calm the bees, the hive cover and other components are removed. Frames filled with honey are first removed and shown to the children. Broken honey comb always offers a sweet taste to the children, as well as to the foraging bees.

Next, frames covered in workers are removed and shown to the sitting children. The bees can be seen conducting the waggle dances and moving about the honey combs. Occasionally the random male can be seen scooped up. Males, remember cannot sting, and therefore offer a harmless means for the children to get past the fear of bees hurting them. Some braver students

have asked to hold frames; often the request is honored and they are able to overcome initial fears of bees.

1 Kim Flottum and Kathy Summers of Bee Culture Magazine, ed, The New Starting Right with Bees Second Edition (Medina, Ohio: A.I. Root Publishing Company, 1997), 39.

Once or twice this year groups have been lucky enough to find the queen as she moves about the combs. While she is capable of stinging, she would rather find refuge in a dark corner of the hive to continue on with her work. By observing a bee colony, the students learn how to identify the queen, distinguish workers from drones and witness the queen as she crawls about the comb, laying eggs in the cell.

On other frames of combs, nurse bees can be seen tending to the developing larva until the time comes to cap the cell. Soon a mature bee will emerge from this cell (much like the butterfly). Further inspection can reveal house bees cleaning the dead bees and other matter from the hive and the foragers dancing away to communicate the location of a new found food source.