The IC apiary hosts the Bee Fest for the Ithaca community

Loose Bee White Suits were presented to Ithaca College students and community members on October 10 as Ithaca College apiary open for visits to the Fall Bee Fest. Outside the apiary fence, visitors strolled through the pollinator garden playing nature bingo for honey sticks and made beehives from tin cans.

The festival was hosted by senior Ana Maria Arroyo, junior Bethany Holland and junior Julia DiGeronimo and other students taking Jason Hamilton‘s, professor in the class of the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Ecological Applications: The Nature and Necessity of Bees. The festival gave visitors the opportunity to explore the pollinator garden, visit beehives, buy honey and paint beehives.

The college apiary is maintained by Hamilton, his students and scientist-in-residence, Emily O’Neil ’21. Hamilton said the apiary is the only undergraduate educational apiary in the country and creates a unique opportunity for students to work with bees and learn the basics of beekeeping. Bee Fest gave the students at the apiary the chance to teach the community how bees manage their hives and support the local ecosystem.

“When you enter for the first time [the apiary], put on the costume and everything, it’s so scary because you’re so scared of ruining everything, ”Riley Burns, sophomore eenvironmental sstudies major, said. “You hear about the sensitivity of hives, how they swarm sometimes, how they sting sometimes. It took me a lot of preparation to get into it.

O’Neil led several groups of tourists to the apiary throughout Bee Fest. Prior to graduating, O’Neil was the apiary’s chief beekeeper. Now she works as a scientist for the Best Bees Company and conducts research using the college apiary. O’Neil said she is currently conducting a bee health study and is working to implement research on bee nutrition and infections. To Cornell University and other major universities in beekeeping practices. One of the main threats to honey bees is Varroa mites, a parasite that infects both adult bees and larvae and can reproduce inside a hive. In addition to feeding on the bee’s body, mites are vectors of disease.

O’Neil also said she was testing smart hives, digital sensors that plug into the bottom of hives and collect data on carbon dioxide levels, acoustics and bee populations. Ideally, said O’Neil, smart hives will be able to send information to beekeepers and notify them of any changes inside the hive.

O’Neil said she was introduced to beekeeping in her first year when she visited the apiary during a class.

“It was the first time I saw bees,” O’Neil said. “I didn’t really know beekeeping was the thing. [Hamilton] gave us a frame of honey and it was the coolest thing ever because we walked around eating honeycomb, and I got hooked.

Senior Ethan Jones is currently enrolled in Hamilton’s class and has assisted at Bee Fest. Jones said he was fascinated with how bees function as a superorganism – a community of the same species that reproduces and behaves as a single organism.

“You have all of these individual bees, but they can’t survive on their own,” Jones said. “Because not all of them reproduce, but they all work together, in an innate way. Like that big organism that makes massive amounts of honey. It’s just really cool.

Denise O’Leary ’17, a local beekeeper who worked as a head beekeeper in college as a student, attended the Bee Fest. O’Leary recently received his Master Beekeeper Certification from Cornell and is working on starting his own business called Honey Moon Flower Lab. Honey Moon Flower Lab, O’Leary said, will be an educational business run by his two apiaries located in Odessa, New York, on his partner’s family land and in Hampshire, New York. O’Leary said she hopes to raise bees acclimatized to the Finger Lakes area and help other beekeepers get started.

“Beekeeping is a meditative experience,” said O’Leary. “When you are in a beehive you have to watch out for so many things and it’s so easy for me to get out of my head and just focus on the bees. You smell all those good smells, you touch all the sticky wax and propolis. It is a complete sensory experience that accompanies you when you return home. When I get home I smell the smoke and feel good because I was watching little golden workers all day.

O’Leary noted she currently supervises several beekeepers in the Ithaca region. Among them are hobbyist beekeepers Jennifer Irwin and John Stiteler. Irwin first met O’Leary when they worked together at Just A Taste, a local restaurant. Irwin said that O’Leary convinced her to start beekeeping when she came to visit him and noticed Irwin watching a group of bees buzzing above his flowers.

Irwin has two beehives in her backyard and says she learned everything she knows about beekeeping from O’Leary.

“It’s great to have [O’Leary] here to help me with the millions of billions of “What does this mean?” What does it mean? Oh, you look at that, ”Irwin said. “We usually open the hives together. I’m just starting to feel comfortable opening them on my own, ”Irwin said. “I feel like I can interpret what they’re doing, but i need help. I am getting better.

Stiteler has kept bees in his garden for more than 20 years and said he contacted O’Leary two years ago for help with his bees after hearing his neighbors praise his knowledge. Stiteler said when his wife passed away a year and a half ago, O’Leary asked him if he had spoken to the bees about her death.

“She told me about this custom in Europe and the British Isles where if there is a death in the family, especially the death of the beekeeper himself, or if there is a birth in the family, you’re going to tell the bees, ”Stiteler mentioned. “Because it’s not a good thing that bees feel left out. And also, the bees fly to the sky. So they are a connection. I’m still a little smothered when I think about announcing my wife’s passing to the bees, but it really helped me a lot.

This article was produced with additional reporting from Elijah de Castro, Associate Editor for Life and Culture.