Owens Community College honeybees support community garden

Owens Community College honeybees support community garden




About 20,000 bees live tucked away on Owens Community College’s Perrysburg Township campus, quietly pollinating the surrounding grassland and nearby community garden.

Krista Kiessling, director of campus and community connections at Owens, has kept honeybees her whole life — her father kept hives when she was younger.

“It’s kind of a spiritual experience for me,” Mrs. Kiessling said. “I have to ground myself before I come out here.”

She said the bees can sense when an approaching human feels nervous and express anxiety in return by fluttering their wings louder and presenting aggression. The bees were quiet Wednesday morning.

Beehives require weekly maintenance to check for ample egg production, honey storage, and pests. Mrs. Kiessling smoked the four-story hive, then removed the top drawer to check for excess honey before she removed deeper frames to observe their egg production.

Despite their high pollination season coming to a close, the bees had not left much excess food. Most small beekeepers have a “bee first” policy, meaning they will not dig into the main hive to retrieve reserve honey for profit.

One bee only produces 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.

Owens Community College in Findlay established the first bee colony in 2018. Bob Connour, a professor of biology at Owens, and his colleague Tara Carter established the Findlay apiary to become the first certified bee campus in Ohio.

After a year of success there, Mrs. Kiessling jumped on the opportunity to establish a colony at the central campus.

“The reasons were multiple. Number one is just to help people understand our food systems and understand the importance of pollinators to agriculture,” Mrs. Kiessling said of opening the Toledo-area location.

Their colonies of native bees — a genetic strain local to the area, and hardened to the weather patterns — can pollinate plants up to two miles away.

Roger Myers, former president of the Maumee Valley Beekeepers Association and beekeeper of 30 years, said it’s hard to tell how much of an impact local beekeeping has on the ecosystem. However, the 74 association members are a small portion of Lucas County beekeepers who help to fill gaps in the native population’s flying range.

“The more good beekeepers there are, the better your pollination overall is going to be,” Mr. Myers said. “Most of Lucas County is well covered with honeybees from somebody’s hives.”

Although the college keeps its apiary far from where honeybees could sting passers-by who may have allergies, Mrs. Kiessling wants people to know that bees would rather not sting you. The common knowledge that a bee dies after inflicting a sting is true, she said.

“They just want to eat their food and make babies,” Mrs. Kiessling said.

The largest threat to bee colonies nationally are not directly humans but varroa mites. A type of parasite, the tiny varroa mite feeds off of honeybees and carries lethal diseases.

They can kill an entire colony in just a few months, but no hive is completely free of the red insects. Regular maintenance is key to keeping a healthy hive.

Over this past winter, the Owens apiary lost two colonies because of varroa mites, leaving them with only one hive. Findlay has five. Their rate of loss varies by year, but applying an organic mite solution significantly helps to preserve colonies over the winter.

“You can tell if they’re sick,” Mrs. Kiessling said. “It’s like a pet, really.”

The apiary’s bees can reach the Owens community garden and pantry from their hive, as can other pollinators like butterflies, moths, and birds.

Each pollinator has a food preference, so the garden is filled with a plethora of plants like zucchini, tomatoes, strawberries, and milkweed — though no pesticides are used to keep weeds or destructive bugs at bay.

To maintain an organic garden demands more labor, but it keeps the bees and patrons safe. Pantry patrons — largely the 52 percent of Owens students who have experienced food insecurity — can pick fresh produce right off the vine during harvest seasons.

“It’s worth it to be able to come out here and eat anything we grow without worrying about chemicals,” Mrs. Kiessling said.

Pesticides and overuse of chemical mite solutions have caused millions of commercial beehives in California to collapse in the past two decades. While local beehives do not suffer the same widespread losses, backyard beekeepers still face risks due to pesticides.

Mr. Myers lost a significant amount of bees during farm planting season, which he blames on pesticide use. Bees fly to nearby farms and take home sublethal amount of chemicals, which spread to the rest of the colony.

“Worldwide and in the county, we have a very severe lack of pollinating insects. And a lot of that is because of the pesticides,” Mr. Connour said.

At Owens, the beekeepers are concerned with the biomagnification of pesticide toxicity. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 35 percent of food crops around the world depend on animal pollinators — what the pollinators eat ends up in our own food.

While one apiary can only provide so much assistance to a weakened ecosystem, planting native species and using organic pest removal can make a difference.

“Like I tell my students, I can’t fix all the environmental problems of the world,” Mr. Connour said, “but I can work on what’s local.”