The Bee Awareness Society is again gearing up for another busy year of installing observation bee hives in Kootenay Region schools. 2019 will be the Society’s fifth year of activity.
The Society’s mission is to install the observation honey bee hives and then to provide age appropriate learning activities for the students to teach them about honey bees, their life cycles, and how they impact human food sources, and agriculture. The lessons also include how other native pollinators from bees, butterflies, and moths, to hummingbirds and bats are also involved in the process of pollinating plants. In addition students are shown how they can help pollinators by planting pollinator friendly plants in their home gardens to encouraging their parents to restrict their use of chemical herbicides and insecticides. The hives have glass panels so the children can watch the bees safely and a connecting tube through a window so the bees can safely enter and exit the hive.
Observation hives have been installed in 11 school classrooms; Columbia Park Elementary (Revelstoke), Jewett Elementary (Meadow Creek), Ecole des Sept-sommets (Rossland), Redfish Elementary (Balfour), W.E. Graham (Slocan), Winlaw Elementary and the Whole School (Winlaw), Wildflower Elementary and L.V. Rogers (Nelson), Mt. Sentinal (South Slocan), and Salmo Elementary. If you are interested, you can also see one of these hives in action at the Frog Peak Café in Crescent Valley, the Four Nations Indigenous Coalition in Passmore, or the Selkirk College Library at the Castlegar campus. If your child’s school does not have an observation hive and would like to get one, ask your child’s teacher or school principal to contact the Society at:
https://beeawareness.ca/contact/
If you would like to donate funds or in kind materials to the society, you can also contact them at the link above.
Bee Awareness Society 