Student vets bring beekeeping to campus prairie

Two Ohio State Marion Marine Corps veterans are making their mark on sustainability efforts and the campus community by introducing beehives to the Larry R. Yoder Prairie Learning Laboratory, an eleven-acre Sandusky Plains tall grass restoration project that began on the campus in 1977.

After attending the Central Ohio Beekeepers Association (COBA) Veteran Beekeeping School together, Todd Lee, a junior social work major from Delaware, Ohio and Eric Bailey, an engineering technology major from Columbus, Ohio, the two brought their joint vision together by delivering two hives to the campus prairie at the end of spring semester.   

According to Bailey, the idea of bringing beehives to the campus prairie began with organizing an outreach event with COBA at Ohio State Marion. 

“We had Bob and Claudia Bowers from the Central Ohio Beekeepers charitable foundation come to campus. We were just doing some outreach to try to get veterans to sign up for Veteran Beekeeping School of this year,” said Bailey.

“Todd had brought up the idea of, why don't we have bees at the prairie? The idea kind of took off from there. We started working with Bob and Claudia, they thought it was a great idea. We brought them out here and looked at it, and we went from there,” he added. 

"I believe the bees serve multiple purposes," Lee said. "As Eric explained, when I came up with the idea, my first thought was that it's a fantastic concept because it encompasses so many different aspects. It benefits the ecological health of the prairie and contributes significantly to the overall goal of conserving it."

“Eric and I both being Marine Corps veterans realized in the beekeeping school how much the bees really help veterans on various levels,” Lee said.

“Each person faces unique struggles and challenges, and bees can impact these differently. For me, I can say that confronting and overcoming my fears gives me a sense of confidence. Once you realize that you can tackle something again, you begin to rebuild your confidence and boost your self-esteem. As a result, you also start to learn more about bees. There’s a real humanistic experience to this, and it makes the journey enjoyable,” he said.

Lee feels the bee apiary will impact students and the campus in a host of positive ways and hopes this helps build the project to the point where it is ingrained as part of campus culture.

“It will only have a synergistic effect until it's completely finished, which we hope will never happen. Eric and I both work hard to communicate and promote the project in order to engage our campus community, including faculty, students, and other veterans. Therefore, we hope to see this become a long-term initiative," said Lee.

“We wanted to bring back the knowledge we had gained from the school that did so much for us and share it with others. It's important for all of us to have a sense of service, and this project kind of gives us that,” Lee concluded.

Bailey shared that each of the new hives has its own queen marked in blue for this year. Each year that a queen is produced, it's marked and identified in a different color. The honeybee hives were commercially produced from Georgia and are now in place with the goal of growing the colony. 

“There will be approximately 30 to 60 thousand bees when they build up their colony. Right now, what they're going to do is they're going to release that queen and within the next couple days we'll come back and check and see if they release the queen and we're going to feed them in the brood boxes. Then the queen will start laying eggs. From there they'll build out the comb,” Bailey explained. 

“When they build up about 80% of the comb, I think there's eight frames in there. So, you know, six, seven, eight frames of comb are built out,” Bailey said. “We'll then add another brood box on there.  and they'll build up their colonies that way. Later in the season, they'll start making honey in there for stores over the wintertime,” he added.

The two bee enthusiasts hope the growth of the colony and honey production can lead to additional commercial campus ventures.

Bailey said, “Maybe it can help support this project and maybe other projects on the campus. And like we talked about; we want to be able to involve others in the project. We both live in the area, but we want to be able to kind of transfer this thing over and get people involved in keeping it and hopefully it catches on that way,” Lee sees this as an outreach for veterans, even if they don’t attend Ohio State Marion.

“We want to incorporate as many veterans as possible who are interested in engaging with bees and learning about beekeeping. It’s something that we can use as a platform to help multiple people who may be struggling,” Lee added.

Looking at future growth the two students hope there is a time in the future when the hives can start producing significant amounts of honey that can be marketed and used to expand their program or other important campus initiatives.

Lee explained the first thing that came to his mind was the food pantry at Ohio State Marion and providing honey to students.

“They go up to a max of about 70 pounds of honey per hive,” Bailey shared. “Ohio State Marion’s prairie will have some honey now, prairie honey.” 

“We want to say thank you to the faculty because when we started this whole project we were like, we're just going to give it a whirl, but we thought it was going to be a real struggle. And honestly, it wasn't. It has been a great process working with Ohio State Marion and working with Bob and Claudia from COBA charitable foundation. They were supportive and helped get this all accomplished,” said Lee.

“What we want to do is we want to include the Veterans and Sustainability Club on campus, and we've mentioned it to the students,” said Bailey. 

“We're the ones that are kind of taking care of it, managing it, and moving it forward. But the biggest goal is to incorporate veterans, sustainability and campus students. Without them,” Lee shared, “It won’t have the same impact.”

Lee and Bailey see several connections with faculty incorporating the bee apiary into hands-on real-world study, especially with biology being a major at Ohio State Marion and conservation being important to several people on campus.

Support for the project has come from Central Ohio Beekeepers Association and their foundation, which hosts the school for veterans. Lee and Bailey agreed, everyone involved in bringing the hives to Ohio State Marion has been supportive. 

“We haven't reached any real resistance from any angle. Everybody, the staff from Ohio State, COBA, everybody just like jumped in and said yeah, let's do it,” Bailey said. 

For more information on the veteran’s school for beekeeping or bees in general contact the Central Ohio Beekeepers Association through their website https://centralohiobekeepers.org. Students and or veterans who wish to get involved with the project at Ohio State Marion are asked to contact Eric Bailey at bailey.1768@buckeyemail.osu.edu or Todd Lee at lee.11081@buckeyemail.osu.edu.