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Middleburg-Clay Hill Library now abuzz with a new bee garden

By Wesley LeBlanc
Posted 5/27/21

CUTLINE: After being delayed for more than a year, the Middleburg-Clay Hill Library is now home to thousands of honey bees which will pollinate flowers and produce honey for the state’s first-ever …

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Middleburg-Clay Hill Library now abuzz with a new bee garden


Posted

MIDDLEBURG – The Middleburg-Clay Hill Library is now home to thousands of bees residing in the new garden.

The Clay County 4-H Bee Stingers Club president, Josh Knowles, was joined by the club’s other members on May 22 to help install new flowers in two garden beds behind the library before transferring more than 10,000 bees to their new home.

“Honey bees like big, open areas,” Knowles said. “That’s why this place is perfect. We’re planting flowers specifically for them to pollinate...and as you can see, these flowers are right by their setup so they can fly right over this fence and pollinate the flowers.”

One of the club’s co-leaders, David Sieruta, said the club expects 40 to 50 pounds of honey each year. They’ll extract honey in the middle of June and again in the middle of September. While the bees have two garden beds right outside of their hive setup, those flowers won’t be the only things they pollinate.

They’ll travel all around the library and the surrounding woods pollinating flowers. The flowers just outside of their hive are best for the nectar dearth season, which is a slower period for bees and the flowers they usually pollinate. That’s when the new flowers installed in the club’s garden beds will come in handy as the flowers installed there are great in Summer weather.

“Bees love gardens like this because it’s all they have during the dearth season,” 4-H co-leader Ralph White said.

The 4-H club held an event in March of 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, to explain the importance of bees and why the Middleburg-Clay Hill Library would be a good home. The bees were originally going to be installed shortly after but because of COVID-19, the installation didn’t happen last week.

The bees are happy and buzzing at their new home now, though. The 4-H club used a $1,500 grant from several years ago to build a tall fenced-in square for the hive to reside. Two new garden beds also were installed. Other 4-H members and community members interested in the project showed up to help out.

The hive is made up of 10 frames and a super, which is a section of the hive where the excess story will go when there’s an excess. The queen bee is stuck inside a sugar-coated cage that the bees will eventually eat through over the coming days. The idea was to give the bees time to acclimate to the queen and vice versa. When the sugar cage is no more, the queen will join the 10,000-plus bees at their hive.

When you look through the observation window in the fenced-in area, you will see a white box with bees. You’ll likely see bees flying over the fence to the nearby flowers, too. The queen and bees always are busy inside building the hive, and as the process continues, the bees will begin to form honey.

“It takes seven to eight pounds of honey to make one pound of beeswax,” Sieruta said. “They’ll have a strong hive in about a day and a half and in about two days, a good nectar flow will begin for the hive, and...honey comes after that.”

The Stingers encourage anyone and everyone to go to the library to check out their installation. It’s on the back of the library, and not visible from the main road.

“It’s about getting the word out,” 4-H co-leader Susan Welch said. “We want people to get involved because what we’re doing here is really neat. This bee garden is just one of the many things we do.”