Elementary Students Have A Sweet Time At Honey Extraction Workshop

By Savannah Barker, Linden teacher

Elementary students were excited to welcome the beekeeper from Alvéole to Linden recently to learn about extracting honey. Students rotated through three stations:wax-scrapers, honey-tasters, and mural-artists. Wax-scrapers learned how to use “combs” to gently pull the wax caps off of the honeycomb cells so that honey will flow out of them. Honey-tasters got to sample honey from a few different places around Toronto, and look closely at some of the beekeeping tools like hats and smokers. The mural-artists put their art skills to work as they designed a mural based on their favourite parts of the beekeeping season. Their mural is now displayed outside of room 203B at Linden.

After rotating through all of the learning stations, the group got back together to cheer on a few of the grade 6 students as they spun the uncapped frames to extract the honey. We watched as the wax was removed from the liquid honey using a strainer. Finally, the sunny-yellow honey was tapped into jars, ready to be sold in our annual Honey Sale.