Young offenders at a Burnaby jail will care for hives full of bees for high school credit thanks to a new board authority approved beekeeping course.
The Burnaby school board approved Introductory Beekeeping 11 in February, and the first students to take the program will be at Fraser Park Secondary, the district-run school at the Burnaby Youth Custody Services Centre.
The course was created by Cariboo Hill alternate education teacher Brian Saunders, who is also a professional beekeeper.
He thinks the activity will be a good fit for the centre’s clientele.
“Kids that are drawn to thrill seeking – there’s a certain attraction to the perceived danger of 10,000 bees,” he told the NOW. “It is a bit of a rush the first time you hold up a frame full of bees. You have to be very careful.”
Students, who range from age 12 to 17 at the centre, helped build two hives in the centre’s shop class, and Saunders dropped off a nucleus colony (nuc) of bees last month.
Swathed in beekeeping veils, a small group of youths welcomed them to their new home next to the jail’s garden.
Despite their protective clothing, most students stayed well clear of the bees.
Most, but not all.
“It’s fun,” said one 15-year-old who helped Saunders lift bee-covered frames into hives, raised his arms in the air and called himself the “bee whisperer” as thousands of the insects buzzed around him.
“Honestly, I used to be scared of bees, but now that I have this suit on and stuff, I feel good and get to play with them,” he said.
There’s always one, Saunders said.
“There’s always someone that is kind of excited by what seems like a dangerous situation,” he said. “He had that kind of fun moment where you realize it wasn’t that dangerous.”
Saunders took up beekeeping about seven years ago and founded Raincity Beekeeping, a business with bees on the roof of a hotel in West End Vancouver and at an organic co-op in Aldergrove.
It took him about a year of paperwork, he said, to unite his two jobs in the school district’s newest elective.
Even if his Fraser Park students don’t take up beekeeping as a career, Saunders said research shows it’s a “very good activity for mental health and life skills for certain populations.”
Besides tending the bees outside, students will spend some classroom time learning about the insect’s biology and life cycle as well as the diseases and parasites that threaten it.
“I’m not going to force these guys to sit through hours and hours of classroom learning but enough that they understand what’s happening and what to look for when they get to the point of inspecting a hive,” Saunders said.
The logistics of bringing certain programs to Fraser Park can get complicated, according to head teacher Tom Cikes.
Not all students can mix in every program, for example, but Cikes said he was on board with the beekeeping course from the beginning.
“As many programs as we can integrate here to keep the students interested, it just keeps them from wandering in different directions that we don’t want them to wander,” Cikes said.
