Service Learning Experience at the Honey Extraction

For my service learning, I volunteered at the honey extraction event, sponsored by the
bee club. The bee club is supervised by Professor Mary Whitfield who can be contacted
using the email; m.whitfield@email.edcc.edu. I was at the event from 12:30pm until about
3:30pm. The purpose of this event was to extract the honey collected from the hives in
the fall and purify the wax that had been collected and melted down previously.
During the event, I helped scrape off the wax that had capped the honey inside each of
the cells in a frame and purify previously melted wax with was full of bits of bees, debris
from the trees, and plenty of other things the bees could've picked up in the process of
making the wax. The process includes boiling some water in a pot and adding the unpurified
melted down wax into another vessel and placing the vessel into the pot of boiling water.
This then melts the wax is strained through a towel and a mesh cloth as well as a metal
strainer, which is put onto another vessel and holds the now purified wax. The picture
shown shows the wax at different stages of purification.

The bees have been struggling for a while; the winters in this area are very harsh for
an organism that heavily relies on flowering plants and moderate temperatures. But
recently it seems like the bees are struggling to stay alive and string during the winter.
Last winter all the bees died due to being weak against the enemies that are the wasps
and the cold weather in this area. It also hit me a little harder when Mary mentioned that
there was much more honey produced at the last extraction. While I’m not sure if there
was the same number of frames were extracted from the last honey extraction as were
extracted at this event. This event is environmentally friendly because instead of making
synthetic waxes for all sorts of cosmetics and other things like crayons. Using natural
waxes like beeswax is not only better to put on your skin, it’s better for the environment
as beeswax doesn’t need pollutants like hydrocarbons, which are extremely harmful when
used in mass production factories. For those who consume honey, it’s a great natural
sweetener, and consider it as a healthy sugar.

Service learning is a great opportunity to show how biology is interdisciplinary.
Biology is the study of life, which may seem vague but it is everywhere. It explains
how organisms work and what life needs to continue surviving. With the change of
an ecosystem, as we learned in class, an organism can either adapt and try to survive
or fail to make any changes to their survival techniques and die. This is also when
some genes that were unfavorable before become better for fitness and survival.
Bees are struggling to adapt to the cold climate of this area, but their survival is
necessary for plenty of our food choices. Another thing we learned in Animal Biology
is the way the body plan in every organism comes together. Hox genes are a set of genes
in every living organism that, with the right receptors and proteins, can “turn on” a certain
feature in the body plan of an animal. Bees are insects, therefore, they have the major
body segments in their body plan. The difference comes in when we look at their stingers
and wings, which are a couple of things that make bees very different from other insect
organisms. The bees use pollen which is collected from a variety of plants to eventually
come back to their hive and make honey. The process of pollination is vital to many
organisms as without pollination plants are unable to reproduce and grow into the fruits
and vegetables we consume every day, such as strawberries, apples, and many
other flowering plants.   

Based on the service learning activity a few questions I still have about the bees include;

When buying honey at farmers’ markets you see many varieties of honey, such as clover
honey, how is this made? Is it honey extracted from bees that only pollinated clovers
or is this an additive to the honey?

What makes honey crystallize versus just becoming hard?

How can honey have an almost indefinite shelf life?

What can be done to give the bees a better chance of staying alive through the winter?