My Senior Ventures’ project, Sunny Honey, is to become a beekeeper and collaborate with other local beekeepers. I plan on making bees a bigger part of Darlington’s community by offering hands-on bee-keeping education and creating pamphlets to promote beekeeping along with our honey, lotion bars, and lip balm. I also plan to present on bees at community events such as the lower grades Insect Expo. Along with the Insect Expo, I hope to do some fun activities with the lower grades so the children and teachers can make bee products of their own. At other community events, I want to share my latest findings on the hives and bee products.
Bees have many benefits to the environment and the people caring for them. They are important pollinators that vital to our food supply. The multibillion-dollar agriculture industry depends on the health of bees. They also provide benefits for humans; bee products can modulate the immune system and act as an anti-inflammatory. Besides the actual benefits, I want people to see how relaxing tending to bees can be. This meditative craft can reap huge rewards that I want to share with other members of the community.
Once wintertime is here and the bees need the honey to survive, I plan on improving the hives. I want to move the hives closer to the driveway, so it will be easier to transport the bees, which makes the process less stressful. This also will get them out of the overgrown weeds and allow them to flourish.
My school mentors are Mrs. Haynes and Mr. Kinney. My community mentor is Mrs. Johannes, who over the summer let me tend to her bees and create all kinds of different bee products. I hope to bring the ideas that she shared with me to the Darlington Community and really show people how they, too, can have hives and reap all the rewards by just going to their back yard.
Senior Ventures is a year-long academic program built on a framework of leadership, innovation and community engagement. Through a proven self-guided exploratory process, seniors whose proposals are selected for this program work independently to develop a project that’s interdisciplinary in scope and is connective, performance-based, investigative, or entrepreneurial. Click here to learn more.
