With Carrie Driehaus as their guide, students tasted honey from the honeycomb and sat back as Carrie told them tales about bee adventures. The story began with sadness as Carrie let the students know that all the bees in our 2 hives were lost this winter to the cold. But luckily, a New School family knew of a swarm of bees in someone’s attic, so Carrie went there and collected that swarm’s queen, moving her to a smaller “transport hive.” In no time, the swarming bees left their spot in the attic and joined their queen in the transport hive so they could take up residence at The New School Montessori.
Carrie answered questions and talked a bit about queen bees and the important role they play in the hive. As in the attic story above, bees will follow their queen anywhere and are rather docile when they have no hive to protect and simply go where she goes. One can distinguish the queen from the other bees because she is larger and quite a bit longer than other bees. The queen’s job is to lay eggs all of her life and is fed a special diet of royal jelly rather than honey and pollen, which is what the worker bees eat daily.
Click the link to see a video of Carrie from Spectrum News with a story they did on her called, Ohio Stories: Carrie Driehaus and Queen City Pollinator Project