Celebrating its first fall semester, the University of Virginia’s Northern Virginia campus is buzzing with excitement – no one more so than beekeeper and Dean Greg Fairchild and the campus’s two beehives.
Occupying part of a 117-acre campus in Fairfax, UVA Northern Virginia officially opened in March, offering graduate and professional degree programs from several University of Virginia schools. It is home to lots of wildlife, in addition to two hives of an Italian breed of European honeybees.
Claire Sherwood, an urban beekeeper at Alvéole, manages the hives and harvests the honey, checking in every three or four weeks to make sure the bees are healthy and happy. The hives are made up of three wooden boxes, the top two ones used for honey production and harvesting.
Urban beekeeper Claire Sherwood says one of her favorite things about bees is that there are designated undertaker bees that "undertaker bees will physically drag dead hivemates from their hive and create piles of dead bees that look like burial mounds." (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)
The bees get to work as soon as the flowers bloom and, by the end of summer, the honey is ready for harvest. The two hives produced so much this year, Sherwood had to come back twice to harvest.
“It was probably over 100 pounds of honey in total, because they’re on the ground and have this beautiful forest behind the campus. There’s so much flower production they can use to make so much honey,” she said. “They can make up to two to three times more honey than they actually need, so we harvest the extra.”
At the campus’ official opening earlier this year, she gave out more than 200 small jars of honey and information about bees to guests. “One of the biggest misconceptions about bees is that they are predominantly male, but they are actually 90% to 95% female,” she said.
