Sophia McCrackin
Isabella Well’s shoes stuck to the bright green tarp laid out on the chipping tennis court as she crouched in front of a large, silver cylinder. The adhesive on the tarp was a thin film of golden honey, which Well poured from a tap at the bottom of the metallic device, a honey extractor, into a squat mason jar. The junior environmental studies major and incoming president of the USF Hiveminders Club was helping coordinate the club’s spring honey harvest.
“I guess I just wanted to be able to make […] a tangible positive environmental impact,” said Well.
The Hiveminders Club maintains four on-campus beehives, and harvests the honey about twice a year. Their past events have included making lip balms, candles and salves. But on Friday, March 21, the Hiveminders were simply distributing honey to anyone who showed up with their own jar.
“Per harvest we’ll get maybe like 30 to 50 of these,” said Well, holding up her jar. “What is this? Eight ounce jars? Six ounce jars? It really depends.”
Each beehive is filled with frames containing hundreds of hexagonal cells in which the bees deposit pollen and make honey. When the bees have “capped off” a frame full of cells with beeswax, the beekeepers remove the frame from the hive, scrape off the outer beeswax layer and place the frame into the extractor, which spins the frame and removes the honey through centrifugal force.
“You still have the integrity of the hexagonal cells, but the honey is able to be extracted,” said Skye Nephew, a senior environmental studies major and the current president of the Hiveminders Club. “[We] filter it out usually with a strainer, but […] I think unfiltered honey is actually better for you.”
Queti Janzen, a senior psychology major who attended the harvest, said she plans to use her honey to sweeten her daily matcha. “I’ve always appreciated bees, but actually harvesting honey gave me a whole new respect for the work these tiny pollinators do,” she said. “The most interesting part for me was learning that the honey’s orange tint came from the poppy flowers the bees were feeding on.”
The harvest was the club’s first event at the School of Education tennis courts since they received access to convert the space into a pollinator’s garden. “Ideally, we’re gonna put some beehives in here, and we’re going to have some boxes that we’re going to plant native plants in. It’s just gonna be sort of like an expansion of the community garden, but more focused on native plants and pollinators,” said Well.
The project is funded by ASUSF Senate’s Green Initiative For Tomorrow (GIFT) Fund. The GIFT fund is dedicated to student sustainability initiatives on campus.
“We just ordered a new tool shed. We ordered some bird boxes that we’re gonna put in here. We’re making some signage,” said Well, “And then, garden tools and soil and we’re doing irrigation, [and] things like that.”
“Events like this are important for the USF community because they create a third space, which our generation needs,” said Janzen.
Carly Naour, a sophomore environmental science major, joined the Hiveminders Club when she arrived at USF. “It’s not like an ordinary experience,” Naour said, as she mimed donning a beekeeper’s suit. “Putting on the mask and everything is cool.”
Naour said that she joined Hiveminders because she is passionate about bees and their environmental impact. “Pollinators are so important for all of natural life. Flowers need to be pollinated. Trees grow because of pollination,” she said.
For Nephew, a founding member of the club, its significance in her life has grown beyond a mission of sustainability. “It inspires me to be persistent,” said Nephew. “I just was inspired by hearing stories of how people wanted to get this into a green space, and so just being persistent, fighting for the bees, we faced some bumps in the road. […] Post grad, I’m going keep that fire, be persistent and just advocate for pollinators, for people and for the Earth.”
Editor-in-Chief: Jordan Premmer, Chief Copy Editor: Sophia McCrackin, Managing Editor: Jordan DelFiugo, Opinion Editor: Dakota Duran, Scene Editor: Elina Graham
