By Sophia McAvoy, Class of 2017
Inspired by my Science Fair project, the Middle School at Woodside set itself a goal to be the first school in the United States to build, and maintain, a Slovenian hive. We accomplished this goal in April of 2019! Slovenian beekeeping is a technique that originated in Slovenia over 100 years ago. Slovenian beekeeping is more efficient, and is healthier for both bees and humans.
We were inspired by the fact that Slovenian students of all ages learn beekeeping basics and the bee’s importance to the environment. We hope to spread that concept here in the US by offering AZ hive tour, workshops for local agricultural groups, beekeeping associations, and schools. We also hope to start a 4-H club in our county that focuses on bees because there is not one in our county currently.
Within our classroom this hive will help us achieve our secondary goal of expanding our microeconomy by selling nucs, expanding our current honey sales, and various products from the hive (lip balm, creams, soap, and candles).
We also plan to use the hives to do scientific research comparing and contrasting the Langstroth hive with the Slovenian hive.
Slovenian beekeeping is a technique that originated in Slovenia over 100 years ago! Slovenian beekeeping is more efficient, and is healthier for both bees and humans. It removes the burden of lifting an eighty pound hive super, (where the honey is stored) so smaller children and adults who may not be able lift such a heavy object. The frames where the bees reside slide out of the back of the hive, which removes the hassle of having to lift the top off and take everything out, including the bees, which aggravates them. A Slovenian Hive allows the bees to be much calmer and more peaceful than in the Langstroth hive. Since we have children on campus who are very young, and hope to bring people of all ages and abilities to learn about bees, calmer bees who are less likely to sting are ideal.
The Slovenian bee house is essentially a shed with specially fitted beehives placed in the front, where the bees’ entrances/exits are located. In the house, there is enough room for storage and a work space for honey extraction and/or other necessities and/or activities that we may need to do to take care of the bees.
Written by Kat Jacks, 8th Grader
"A Bee is an exquisite Chymist" [chemist] – Royal Beekeeper to Charles II
Bottling honey is how we prepare it for storage and sales. After the honey is extracted, we strain it by pouring the honey through a fine straining material (we use cloth or plastic), making sure nothing but honey ends up in the bottling bucket.
The bottling process requires a team effort, lots of patience, and a tolerance for being sticky. It is very important to keep the workspace clean and to only use clean, sanitized materials. We split our work into three tasks: carefully pouring our honey out of the bucket’s nozzle and into bottles; putting the caps on and washing the bottles with warm, soapy water to make sure remnants of honey are gone and it is no longer sticky; and labeling the jars.
By the end of the day, we managed to fill an entire table with honey! This year we are planning to enter two types of honey into a judging competition at the Massachusetts Beekeepers Association Annual Meeting. This required us to keep our honey divided by the “super” that it came from so that we could accurately track several factors. More on this in a future blog entry.
Written By Gautam Shankar, 8th Grader
Recently, the Middle School Classroom used a refractometer to figure out the water and sugar content in our honey after we extracted. This year, instead of combining all the honey into a couple of buckets we used a separate bucket for each super so we could do experiments with it and compare each one to the others. We used the refractometer, not only for the science we are doing but also because we are submitting our honey into a competition.
In a honey competition, your honey has to be between 14% to 18% water. If there is too much water it could ferment and if it has too little water the judges could think that we artificially tried to dry our honey. All of our honey was within the competition parameters.
One interesting finding in our comparisons was that the AZ hive had higher sugar content and less water. All of the supers from the Langstroth hives had around the same amount of water and sugar in them, but the AZ hive honey had less water, more sugar, and weighed more. We hypothesize that this might be due to the AZ hive being in a hotter space much of the year (protected by the hive house). We hope to design and experiment for next season that will allow us to test this hypothesis. We also plan to interview experts to see what they think about this hypothesis.
A refractometer (ree-frak-tom-i-ter) is a tool which uses light to measure the amount of sugar and water in a liquid. It works by measuring the angle of light after it goes through a liquid by doing this it is able to determine the water and sugar content in a liquid.
The refractometer measures the amount of sugar using the Brix scale. The Brix scale is largely used in the honey, sugar, fruit juice, carbonated beverage, wine, and maple syrup industries. The Brix scale uses the mass of the liquid to figure out how much sugar is in a liquid instead of volume. One Brix in the Brix scale is equal to one gram of sugar, sucrose to be more specific, in a 100 gram solution. Since honey is relatively dense 100 grams of honey is not that much at all being only around 4¾ tablespoons of honey.
In the near future, we plan to learn more about and conduct experiments on the honey and hives. In the spring, we are also going to use liquid nitrogen to see and compare hygienic behavior in the queen bees. Hygienic behavior in a queen bee helps the hive deal with varroa mites and infected brood better resulting in a healthier hive. We will share our results once we conduct the experiment.