Standing under the leaves of apple trees, the wings of honey bees pulsing inside their small cupped hands, several dozen children learned why Aurora University trumpets its Young Scholars summer program for children as a chance for some hands-on lessons.
“It feels weird. It’s vibrating,” said Brittany Doss, 9, a 4th grader at Goodwin Elementary School in North Aurora. Brittany was one of 28 elementary and middle school pupils on hand as beekeeper Harry Patterson uncovered one of his 20 hives in the apple orchard outside his North Aurora home.
Patterson usually has children handle drones because, unlike their female counterparts, males lack stingers.
Patterson’s class on how bees produce honey is a popular offering among the university’s program of 30 two-week courses enjoyed this summer by more than 400 west suburban children.
“The program allows kids to have firsthand experiences on how environment affects them,” said Jan Sampson, a 6th-grade science teacher at Granger Middle School in Aurora, who also teaches a class in the university’s program.
Patterson donned a beekeeper’s protective outfit, then helped his young assistant for that day, Glenna Murphy, a 3rd grader at Coultrap Elementary School in Geneva, dress herself in the same type of white suit, including overhanging netting and gloves.
Each of Patterson’s hives has a 2-by-3-foot wood area on the bottom called the “brood box” where the queen lays her eggs. Stacked on top by the beekeeper will be “super boxes,” where extra honey is stored by bees.
Honey is created by female bees who fly through a wide territory retrieving nectar from plants. In the bees’ stomachs, the nectar breaks down into what Patterson, a retired teacher, calls “liquid gold.” The bees extract the liquid sugar from their stomachs and, using their strawlike mouths, place it in the cells of the super boxes and fan their wings to dehydrate it into honey.
Acting as Patterson’s assistant, Glenna waved the smoker he had lighted back and forth across the hive, and the aroma and smoke from burning pine needles wafted out.
The smoker is a funnel-capped tin can with a short pipe protruding from one side and small bellows on the other. Flammable material, such as pine needles, is placed in the can and ignited with a match. The bellows then squeeze smoke out through the pipe.
The smoke drifting over the hives triggers the female bees’ fears of forest fires, and in a survival reaction they engorge themselves with the nectar so they can move it from the hive to a new location. The engorging drugs the bees and slows them down, making it safe for Patterson to open the hive’s lids and remove the nectar-filled frames.
Besides their constant commuting to find nectar, the female bees also have to feed all of the male bees as well as the queen bee, and in the winter they surround the queen to keep her warm. The drones’ job is to mate with virgin queen bees when they hatch. When the queen is ready, she starts laying an egg every 40 seconds.
All this work may account for a female worker’s short life span–3 weeks to 3 months–and why each hive needs 30,000 to 80,000 females. The 50 to 75 drones live up to six months, unless they die mating with the queen. The queen can outlive large parts of her brood in her four-year lifetime.
Patterson said he has been a beekeeper for years because he became interested in the hives owned by his grandfather on an Oklahoma farm. He not only sells the raw product to honey manufacturers, but he said he also is called frequently by local police departments when they need help in extracting bees from their communities.
All this firsthand knowledge was nice, but one youngster had something else in mind besides simply learning about bees.
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“How much you want for the honeycomb?” Tom Collins, a 5th grader at Acacia Academy in Burr Ridge, repeatedly called out. Patterson was so engrossed in helping Glenna get the bees out of the hive he did not seem to hear the plea.
Tom insisted he was serious and wanted to negotiate buying the honeycomb Patterson lifted out of the hive.
“I would melt it down and make candles,” he said.