The beekeeping program at St Ignace de Loyola School in Haiti starts off with a little theory. Over a few sessions, students learn the basics of bee biology and the names of the tools and other equipment. They also go over some health and safety tips.
Very quickly, the group moves on to hands-on skills training, which lasts for at least a year. Beekeeping entails a wide range of skills, from processing beeswax to rearing queen bees, from extracting honey to using a flamethrower to disinfect hives that have been infested with wax moth. Some of the students also learn to manufacture Langstroth hives with woodwoorking tools, and to drive the three-wheel cargo motorcycle that transports them. They nurture melliferous trees, and they wield machetes to manage the shade in the apiary.
The group is made up of boys and girls from different classes; the only requirement is to want to learn. They work side by side with the adults who accompany them, and the older students gradually become the teachers of the newer ones. While they are learning a useful trade, the experience is also about doing something positive together. Proceeds from the honey sales help support teacher salaries at the school, to keep tuition affordable for all.
There are endless tasks to be done; these are roughly predictable according to the season, but every visit to the apiary is also completely unique. The trick is recognizing when to apply which bits of knowledge and skill to deal appropriately with the situation at hand. Timing and rhythm are important. So is attention to the bees’ mood, and to the weather. Often, one has to improvise. The only way to get good at it is through experience.
Eventually, the students who stick with it become fully capable of handling all kinds of challenges in the apiary. By that point, some of them decide to set up their own apiary on their family’s land. Even when they become independent in this way, though, they still value coming to the school apiary to collaborate and learn from each other.
Fritzlin and Rubenson, two expert beekeepers inspecting a hive.
At harvest time, uncapping the beeswax from frames without wasting any honey is a necessary skill that takes practice to learn.
On a typical Saturday morning, a visitor to the apiary might hear the students with most expertise asking each other questions like the following: is it better to start a super with the frames at the end, like most beekeepers do around here, or in the center, like that one person does? How do we get the swarm to stay this time? Why does that particular beehive keep getting sick? Would it help if we put some medicinal leaves in the smoker? Should we let this bee colony keep stocking up on honey, or should we split it now so we have a better harvest next year?
On an even deeper level, students of bees gradually learn to notice how everything in the universe is connected. Not least, they contemplate the connections between the rain and the flowers and the honey. When it doesn’t rain on time, even if the rain is plentiful later on, the trees’ foliage might turn lush green, but they won’t blossom. Or, sometimes, they might produce flowers that are dry, with no nectar. The bees need that nectar for food, so for those who – having learned to notice these things – can tell when the bees are hungry, climate change is anything but an abstract concept.
Another connection is between people. Beekeepers love to talk shop with each other, and the elders in the community are especially proud to see a new generation taking interest in the practice. They are happy to share their vast knowledge, and sometimes hire students to help them work. A few of them also lend a hand at the school apiary from time to time. This sharing across generations is also an exchange across styles of beekeeping, since students tend to contribute innovations they have learned from the internet or through visits with internationally experienced beekeepers, while the elders show them the way to do things using the resources that are at hand and taking the local ecosystem into account.
Besides whatever content is transmitted in these conversations, students gain a sense of belonging. To be sure, this rootedness is grounded in an intimacy with their surrounding environment, but it is just as much a rootedness in social relationships. One student, when asked what he most values about the experience, responded that becoming a beekeeper has allowed him to earn the respect of the community.
Beekeeping is always very local, but there is also something universal about it. Wherever these students end up in life, they will have a useful skillset that doubles as a great conversation starter. Hopefully, they will also have acquired enough confidence and wisdom to make their contributions to a world that needs people like them, who have taken the time to learn how to support each other in caring for our common home.
Of course, one could say a lot more about all this in terms of theories of education and development. Aristotle comes to mind, with his three dimensions of knowledge – episteme (conceptual knowledge), techne (technical know-how), and phronesis (practical wisdom) – that build on each other. So does John Dewey, who would recognize in this Haitian experience many aspects of the model of education that he advocated for, not just because it’s about learning-by-doing, but also because of the ways it reinforces democratic citizenship. The things I notice are also influenced by Laura Rival’s work on intercultural farmer-to-farmer exchanges, where she shows how knowledge is always shaped by particular values and informed by specific experience, making encounters with people from a different group especially enriching. In that light, I wonder what you, the reader, make of all this. What else can we learn from these young people in Haiti, and from the bees, and from each other?