On a hot July afternoon they head down the hill to a fenced-off area at the College’s Organic Farm, pull on heavy white protective suits and gloves, zip up hooded veils, and duck under the fence to check out three beehives, each a stack of a few wooden boxes. Farm manager Laura Braasch, the Sustainability Office’s assistant director for experiential learning, explains the mission: “We want to check on the brood situation and whether the bees have enough space in the frames that each box holds.” A healthy hive can hold about 40,000 bees, but if the bees get crowded and a box isn’t added to the stack, they will swarm and head elsewhere.
Braasch has stuffed a handheld smoker with sumac, dried orange peels, and bits of wood to create a dense, cool smoke that calms the bees when the humans break into the hive. As Braasch pries open the first hive and gently lifts out the first of the 10 frames of hexagonal cells inside its top box, Kate Yeo ’25, an environmental studies and government major, pumps the smoker. “It’s a bit like doing CPR,” she says.
The worker bees, all female, simply hang onto the frame, thick with honey, and continue busily humming as they go about their work—feeding larvae, putting a layer of wax over each cell of honey they store, and, in a lower chamber of the hive, feeding the queen.
“The first box I pulled out that was full of bees took my breath away,” says Zoe Johnson ’26, an environmental studies and biology major, who would continue doing hive checks all summer. “I found it kind of thrilling how super systematic they are, radiating outward from the center where the eggs are being laid. We tend to think being organized and systematic is just a human trait—but so are these animals.”
Brin Jaffe ’25, an earth science major and public policy minor, says her game plan was to “stand and watch until I worked up enough nerve. But I wasn’t scared. They weren’t aggressive, and you could tell they weren’t getting through this suit. I can’t wait to do it for the rest of the summer.” And come October, the farm will hold one of the sweetest events of the year—the honey harvest.
