Library class introduces students to beekeeping
Shelley Ogburn shows the inside of a beehive to homeschool students at the Darlington Library. Photo by Melissa Rollins
By Melissa Rollins, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
The Darlington Library was abuzz when Shelley Ogburn and her children visited the Darlington Library last week. It might have been because the Ogburns brought a few winged visitors along with them.
During the weekly Homeschool Hub, Ogburn introduced students to the basics of beekeeping. She showed them the boxes used by the bees to make their hive, explained how honey is collected and even let them try on part of a beekeeper suit.
Ogburn said that her family has had bees for several years.
“How many of you know a lot about honeybees,” Ogburn asked. “In the jar that I am passing around, those are girl bees and they are called worker bees. Guess what? In a beehive, only the girls do the work. The boys, they just become a dad and that’s it and then they die. The girls have to clean out the hives, they have to go get nectar from the flowers and bring it back to the hive. They have to make the comb; they do all the work.”
Ogburn explained that only one bee in the hive has babies and she is a very important part of the colony.
“What do they call the bee in the hive that has all the babies,” Ogburn asked. “The Queen Bee. What do you think the Queen Bee does all day? She just lays eggs all day. And she is so lazy that the other bees bring all of her food to her and they actually put it in her mouth for her. She just makes eggs all day and she doesn’t have to do any other work.”
Though bees all look pretty much the same, there is a noticible difference with the Queen.
“If you were to peep inside of a hive and try to find the Queen, she would look different from everyone else in what way,” Ogburn asked. “She is a lot bigger. She gets fed more than all of the other female bees. So, she looks different but it still would take a while to find her when you look inside the hive because there are thousands and thousands of bees inside the hive.”
One by-product of beekeeping is wax.
“There is a lot of wax on the comb,” Ogburn said. “The comb is actual very, very dark so to get a light wax, you have filter it. You have to filter all of the bee guts out, all of their wing pieces that they lose; all of those pieces like that we have to filter out. Then we have to heat it up so it will be really nice and easy to work with and you can put it in a mold to make a candle. You can also make crayons out of wax.”
