Jefferson's Hava Blair Enjoying Sweet Summer Getting Down to "Beesness"

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Hava Blair

APPLETON, WI (07/08/2011)(readMedia)-- There's a new buzz this summer on the Lawrence University campus that is music to the ears of Jefferson student Hava Blair.

It's the sound of more than 200,000 European honeybees happily making honey under the watchful eye of Blair, Lawrence's first ever beekeeper.

The beekeeper title is an extension of her role as manager of the Sustainable Lawrence University Garden (SLUG), a quarter-acre track of campus managed entirely by students. The garden produces a wide range of vegetables, all grown with sustainable and environmentally benign practices, that are sold to Lawrence and served in the student dining center.

"I came to Lawrence thinking I would become a theatre arts major," said Blair, a 2009 graduate of Jefferson High School and now a junior at Lawrence majoring in geology. "I'm surprised at what a big part of my life working in the garden is. It's a totally different experience than my academic experience. I love the academic environment at Lawrence, but SLUG is remarkable because it's so action oriented.

"The beekeeping duties are just a recent development," added Blair, who worked at the Local Roots community supported agriculture farm in high school. "I love to study geology but I have numerous interests and beekeeping is one of them. Without the diversity of things I'm doing, I think I would be absolutely bored."

Blair, whose only previous experience with bees involved stepping barefoot on one in her backyard as an eight-year-old, received a primer on beekeeping through a night class she took earlier this year at the local technical college.

"It's a fun learning experience. I really love it," said Blair, the daughter of Ronald and Suzanne Blair, Jefferson. "The bees have generated a lot of interest from people in the community. We're hoping to bring in a lot of individuals for workshops and make this an educational experience."

The bees are housed behind a wooden fence in five hives about 150 yards from the garden. An initial shipment of 70,000 bees that arrived in early June from California has since tripled in size. The bees were acquired primarily as an education tool for the campus, but Lawrence is also reaping the benefits of their honey producing and pollination skills, both for the garden as well as an orchard of young fruit trees that students planted on campus in 2010. Bees typically pollinate over a two-mile radius.

Since establishing a bee colony is illegal in most urban settings, Appleton included, Blair and several of her classmates needed to carefully navigate the complicated waters of local politics with a persuasive education campaign for an ordinance change. After a months-long process, Lawrence received the city's blessing to proceed with the bee project.

The key to a successful bee colony, Blair explained, is a healthy, egg-laying queen to maintain a vibrant population. The average life span of a worker bee is a brief six weeks.

"Early on, two of our hives lost their queens. She either died or was killed," said Blair. "We saw those hives become very weak and the population was declining quickly so we had to re-queen them. Bees can create a queen from an egg, but it takes a lot of time. We wanted to replenish our hives quickly, so we purchased new queens."

Quality queen bees, which are shipped in lipstick-sized boxes, can cost upwards of $150. Blair ordered her replacements from Dadant & Sons, Inc., a beekeeping supply company based in Watertown.

While the bees have been producing honey for several weeks now, Blair says the honey needs to remain on the hive for most of the summer in order to ripen.

"The bees bring in nectar from the flowers and they store it in the comb in the hive. They then ripen the honey with their body heat, which helps some of the water in it to evaporate. What we have in our hives now is probably pretty watery honey because it hasn't had a lot of time to ripen. By the end of summer, we'll have the thicker product that we think of as honey."

Blair is looking forward to things getting "sticky" this fall when she harvests the fruits of the bees' labor.

"I'm planning to collect the honey the first week of September. I'm excited. When these hives are in full production next year, we'll probably get about 250 pounds of honey off of them. That's a lot of honey."

The collected honey will be sold to dining services for use in the student cafeteria.