With the intention of celebrating Earth Week, I searched for events on EngageUTD to see what volunteering opportunities were available. Luckily for me, I found three: honey bottling in a Founders lab, apiary inspections with professor Christina Thompson near Lot A and a workday with UTD’s Luna Farm, a half-acre micro-farm in Northside. In the interest of going big or going home, I tried them all.
Earth Week started when I walked into a lab facility and saw a huge jug of dark, amber-colored honey, numerous tiny glass bottles and Thompson, who was eager to tell volunteers how to not only bottle the honey, but how to work efficiently to avoid honey spills. Thompson started the bottling by lifting the jug, pouring into the small jars and showing us how easy the task was—which I’m sure it was for her experienced hands. Us newbies, not so much. The first few glass bottles were heavily overflowing with honey spilling onto the table, but as time went on, us volunteers started to understand the fluid dynamics of honey: slow-and-steady pouring into the glass bottles or you won’t be able to stop the overflow.
During our struggle, Thompson showed us her collected honeycombs and detailed some interesting notes about their appearance: all honey is the same percentage of sugar to water — 80% to 20% — but the reason for the color change depends on what flowers the bees go to. Flowers that are water-based like orange blossoms give a lighter-color because they have fewer minerals compared to flowers like goldenrods, which makes the honey appear darker. Why that’s important for any honey lover, like me, is the flavor. Dark-colored honey has a more intense flavor which is similar to molasses.
Some of the honey bottlers were part of the Office of Sustainability and discussed that they utilized a form of flower-seeding called “chaos gardening” to provide a diversity of flowers that the bees can utilize. The bottling ended with 30 efficiently and well-presented small jars of honey, which would later be given out at the Earth Week fair. Of course, along the way, students had numerous opportunities to try samples of the honey and, luckily for me, I got to take one of the jars.
The next event was similar but certainly more action-packed: inspecting the bee hives that produced the honey we previously bottled, and hopefully collecting even more honey. The hives are located in the apiary northeast of the Administration Building. Later during Earth Week, I walked there and met Thompson, along with other volunteers, and we all suited up into mesh-covered protective suits to prevent any possible stinging. Before getting close to the hives, I didn’t know what to expect, but when Thompson lifted what looked like a lid to an old clothes drawer, I was amazed and a little alarmed to see hundreds of worker bees.
I was startled but she was not. Instead, she readied a smoke canister and puffed smoke onto the bees to allow her to inspect the honeycombs without angering the insects. The smoke doesn’t calm them, Thompson told us. It prevents them from communicating danger signals to each other using pheromones. Based on countless observations, bees have seemingly adopted an evolutionary mechanism that instructs them to start drinking their honey storage upon being smoked, as though the insects are expecting the “fire” creating the smoke to imminently destroy their hive.
Each drawer, or wooden box, inside had at least eight honeycombs, some empty of honey, some jam-packed and overflowing to the brim. Each one was overflowing with bees scurrying to their next task.
Among the dozen-plus hives, a lot of them were lacking any honey storage, theorized as because of rainy conditions but, thankfully, some were quite promising. As us volunteers gawked at the honey in the combs Thompson held up to show, she proceeded to lightly bang and brush the comb to get rid of the bees. Thompson performed it well, whereas I did not. I started off by taking the bee covered honeycomb in my own hands and crushed a corner that release honey — beginner’s mistake. Holding a honeycomb was foreign to me. The honeycomb seems lightweight, but it’s rather heavy. The moving bees walking over my gloves had me praying the gloves were thick, and lightly-banging the honeycomb while bees roamed over it was ludicrous to me.
The process ended with a comb collected but with some bees crawling over my shoes, jeans and zooming around my headset. Thankfully, I experienced no stinging. At least three combs were collected and according to Thompson, at least five pounds of honey are ready for the next bottling session.
The final event I attended was a farm session at UTD’s campus microfarm near Northside. The farm had gardens for onions, carrots, garlic and strawberries as well as a toolshed and greenhouse. With my gloves on and my knowledge of “FarmVille” coming back to me, I took my spade and started weeding before we planted any seeds.
One simply rip off the top layer of weeds and leave the roots. Some of our attempts at weeding were futile and some much more successful, but a few things kept us all united: volunteers sharing weeding tips with each other and finding shared joy in a job well done, how dirty the knees of our jeans got and how cute some of the baby onions looked.
After finishing the weeding, two volunteers and I went to the patches we were working on and began to plant seeds. For our session, we planted black, red and white beans, watered them and made sure not to name them to avoid bad luck. Ten minutes of seeding and two hours of weeding later, we called it a successful day.
For someone with interest in any of these opportunities, or others that involve working with nature, Earth Week was certainly tiring but well worth celebrating. Anyone can watch videos of beekeepers inspecting hives or DIY gardeners rooting up onions, or watch influencers taste true, unadulterated honey, but it can never compare to experiencing these wonders in person.