Over the course of the summer and this fall semester, I have had the great privilege of being a part of the Grove City Bee Research team. I officially joined the research team in the summer of 2024, and I had the opportunity to live at the college over the summer to do research and work with the bees. This was really my first experience with honey bees up close, besides a few brief visits to the bee yard during the Introduction to Apiculture class that I took during the spring of 2024. Being able to get to know each hive, in a sense, by checking on them multiple times a week was a special experience. The girls, as I often affectionately called them, almost displayed their own personalities, and each hive was a little bit different. Caring for the bees was a task unlike any other, and I enjoyed how routine and also unpredictable it was.
During the summer, Julianna Jacobs and I spent time trying to research our research to see what direction we might take the projects
that were currently unfinished with the Bee Project, and this helped to prepare us for the school year when we came back and were able to do more. We were also able to complete honey extraction, be a part of a short video about the project and be a part of an education day at the Tom Ridge Environmental Center in Erie. We were able to educate the community about bees, and have been able to share hundreds of pounds of honey with Grove City faculty and staff and the community as a whole.
Part of what we did during the summer that has now extended into this past semester was honey testing, and we were able to gather results from 14 different samples of honey to compare pollen origins and composition. We were able to compare our results to the claims on the honey packaging, as things are not always as they seem. This project was a fulfilling and eye-opening one to complete, and I am grateful that we had the time and resources to pursue it further.
In addition to the honey testing project, I have been able to work on the Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) project this past semester with Julianna, as well as Luke Culbert, the other research student, and Dr. Yowler, another professor in the biology department. Dr. Farone and Dr. Yowler agreed to work jointly on this project, which meant that all three of us research students got to split our time working on it between the bee year and the lab. This project involved us testing samples from the bee yard against positive controls for DWV to be able to see if the virus was present in our hives, although they did not display symptoms outwardly for the virus. Our results indicated that many of the hives in our yard are asymptomatic for the virus, which further enforces our initiative to treat out bees for varroa mites, the vector of this virus, and to check up on them regularly to watch for symptoms of disease.
Overall, working as a part of the Grove City Bee Research team has been a fulfilling and fun experience, and I am grateful that I got to be a part of this project. Before last spring I knew next to nothing about honey bees, but I have grown exponentially in my knowledge and now I have been able to teach others about them. I am still nowhere close to being an expert, but I am grateful to the college and Dr. Farone for giving me the opportunity to learn and challenge myself in a very unique setting!
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