Bzzzzzzzz...The Ox-Bees Have Landed!

Photos by Lenora D. and friend of Oxbow Allison Watkins

The Oxbow gardens are an integral part of the school--they beautify the campus, provide food, and serve as a platform for artistic inspiration and scientific study. For the last three years, they have been undergoing a face lift. Each spring we've incorporated a major new element into the garden program, each one a step towards enhancing the program's main objectives--to sustain a closed-loop ecological system, to create a lab for the science course, and to provide lots of healthy, fresh, and delicious food to the dining hall. OS24 welcomed the Ox-Chix, which have since become one of the campus's most beloved features. The eggs go directly to the dining hall for breakfast, and the chix provide an important source of soil fertility. OS26 constructed a beautiful  greenhouse (generously donated by Oxbow board member Katie Wheeler), which has enriched the garden program in more ways than we ever could have imagined--namely by allowing us to start all of our own seedlings and to beef up our production of greens during the cold months. Bees were the missing link in our overarching vision for a sustainable garden program at Oxbow. Now, after over a year of planning, the gardens are host to a thriving new colony of honeybees.

 3lbs of bees!

The bees (approximately 10,000 of them!) arrived as a "package" -- a small screened box with a can of "bee food" (sugar syrup) attached. 

Worker bees covering the queen cage

Inside the package, the queen was isolated in her own little cage. To install the bees in their new home, we first removed the queen cage from the package...

The queen cage with candy plug

Her Royal Highness

...and attached it to a frame. Then we released the rest of the bees into the hive and put on the top cover. The little black tube you see on the queen cage (above right) is filled with candy, which the worker bees eat their way through. This takes a day or two, and during that time the hive acclimates to the new queen. When all the candy is gone, the queen crawls out of her cage and settles in for a lifetime of egg-laying.

The Ox-Hive

In a couple weeks, we'll look inside the hive to make sure that everything is going smoothly. For now, we'll keep our fingers crossed that our bees like their new digs. We've heard that other folks who install bee colonies on their property see an incredible increase in fruit and veggie production within the year, so we're very excited for that possibility. And, of course, there will be honey! 

An added bonus of beekeeping: bee suits make us look like aliens