The beehives atop the Algonquin Theatre have resulted in a sweet harvest for some local students.
Beekeeper Craig Nakamoto installed the hives this spring as part of a sustainability project and has been monitoring them ever since. On Monday, it was time to share some of the delicious bounty their industrious workers have produced.
Nakamoto brought three frames laden with honey from the town hives and more from his own hives to show the grade 7/8 class at the Muskoka Montessori School how to get the tasty liquid out of the combs and into bottles.
Among the things the students noticed first were the strong fragrance and the weight of the combs – despite their relatively small size (about 50cm wide by 15cm tall) each one holds more than a kilogram (about three pounds) of honey.
To extract the honey, first the students had to remove the wax plugs that the bees place over each comb to keep the honey in place. They experimented with three tools to uncap the combs: a small beekeeper’s tool called an uncapping fork, a serrated kitchen knife, and an electric knife, but they quickly abandoned the electric knife in favour of the other two methods.
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- Ava Bijl uses an uncapping fork to remove wax from the top of the comb
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- Craig Nakamoto (right) explains to Sully Lance how to slice the wax off the comb
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- Torin Peters-Millar removes wax from the comb as some of the school’s Casa (preschool and kindergarten) watch. (Photo: Craig Nakamoto)
Once both sides of the frame have been uncapped, it’s placed in an extractor – a large, stainless steel centrifuge – along with two others and manually spun around and around to remove the honey. It drips down the inside of the extractor, through a spout, and is collected in a bucket for later bottling.
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- Connor Macmillan (left) removes wax from the comb while Ben Caplan operates the extractor and Heidi Cowan awaits her turn. (Photo: Craig Nakamoto)
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- The honey slowly pours from the extractor through a filter and into a bucket below
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- Grace Gaughan bottles some honey to take home. (Photo: Craig Nakamoto)
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- These students are happy to be taking home some honey (from left) Sage Nakamoto, Grace Gaughan, Ava Bijl, Braeden Horvath Thompson, Sara Chouinard, Torin Peters-Millar, Heidi Cowan, Andrea Hill, Keenan Paterson, Connor Macmillan; (foreground from left) Will Evis, Ben Caplan (Photo: Craig Nakamoto)
“There’s so much to be learned from something like this,” said Montessori principal Timo Bijl. “It’s so empowering for the kids to be able to do real hands-on stuff rather than just read about it in a book.”
Nakamoto will return the frames to the hives with their combs still mostly intact – the bees will consume any honey that remains and then repair the wax so that the comb can be used again. The wax from the caps he’ll melt down for use as candles or wood wax.
The bees didn’t produce enough honey this year for the students to take home more than a small jar each. In future, Nakamoto plans to visit a different school each fall to share the harvest, hopefully with enough honey for the students to sell it as a fundraiser for their class.
Because the colony produced less honey than expected, Nakamoto has been feeding it to help the bees get through the coming colder months. The colony will overwinter on the roof of the Algonquin Theatre before getting back to their important jobs in the spring.
Read more about Nakamoto’s urban beekeeping project here: The Town of Huntsville has some sweet new tenants: bees
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Excellent 2 see this process happening & being promoted. A healthy bee population is essential.