My students need honey extraction equipment for the two beehives we keep in our organic garden and orchard. It includes an extractor, uncapping tank and steel sieve.
$611 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
Give me your distracted, your fidgety, your children yearning to be set free from their desks! My students are on the move, tending the chickens, requeening a beehive, pruning the trees in our orchard and adding compost to our organically grown vegetables. The work never stops and we love it!
We are a small inner city high school with an extremely diverse minority population of 325.
Many students have ties and traditions to the Caribbean Islands and southern U.S. rural areas, while others are purely "city kids" many of whom never so much as step out of the borough. Our agricultural science field program allows them to tend chickens and honey bees, culture organic produce and improve green space for use as carbon offset zones and wildlife protection areas. We meet up to seven days a week first thing in the morning to complete the daily tasks required to run and maintain a small urban farm. Our dedicated group does not always enjoy leaving that natural oasis for some of the more formal sit-down activities presented in the classroom. If not for our active, energetic, hands-on approach, I fear many of them would become discouraged with the more formal educational component and drop out all together.
My Project
During the past two years, my students and I have attended beekeeping workshops and raised enough money to buy a couple of beehives and the necessary equipment to maintain them. The honey production has been good, but unfortunately, we have had to resort to primitive, wasteful techniques in order to separate it from the comb. The time has come for us to "bring it to the next level" and begin separating our comb and honey through the use of an extractor. The Mann Lake Model we are requesting has enough capacity to allow us to refine our honey collection. The uncapping tank and sieve will facilitate further modernization of our operation. The money we earn from the honey sales will allow us to expand our bee yard, increase sales of the sweet product and permit the funding for our next project. My kids are going to have great time uncapping frames, loading them in the extractor and turning the crank until their arms fall off! A sweet reward along with a host of scientific principles!
My students and I are extremely proud to present this ambitious project for your perusal and support.
Your contribution would allow us to more fully engage in the business of keeping bees and harvesting their sweet product. It will ensure continued success for a group of kids who have not been the beneficiaries of a tremendous amount of opportunity in life. They have worked hard from the start, bettering our school, neighborhood and community.
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