What Can Bees Teach Us About Community?

Transcript

Assistant Professor of Biology Matthew Smith: I'm coming in with a research education perspective. We're partnering with folks in the energy and sustainability department of Illinois Tech, as well as the community engagement portion of Illinois Tech, all coming with different use cases and different interests in the bees.

Program Specialist Felena Bunn: The community garden began as a way to open it up so that residents would have access to the university and the university would have access to the community. We worked with two elementary schools. And at U Farm they had a tour of the farm, they saw what was growing, and had a tasting, and then they worked with Matt at the beehive.

Smith: We have these top two are what we call honey supers. So again, we expect to see a lot of like wax with capped honey inside and that's where the bees are storing the food, and all of the flora provisions they've taken from flowers around the area. These larger boxes at the bottom, these two here, that's where we expect to see our developing bees, what we call brood. And our queen will be located somewhere within these bottom two boxes. Likely, it's going to be the top section where she's probably laying some eggs for developing building out the colony.

Bunn: Matt has come and taught our young people so they can understand bees. He had them catching bees and learning the importance of bees and our food systems.

Smith: From understanding what happens when something goes wrong or a particular contaminant that's not supposed to be there is picked up by a bee and brought back to the hive, how that affects the dynamics of the hive, the health of the hive is one question I'm really interested in. And then can the health of a hive tell us and inform us about the health of biodiversity as a whole?