This week in InnovatED we sent some emails off to different people to find information about installing beehives in school. We sent an email to the City of Melville and the Department of Education so that they could forward us information about permits that we would need to have. An example of the email is as below:
Dear City of Melville,
I am David Duff, a year 7 student from All Saints’ College in Bull Creek.
My friend Amrit Jessy and I are working on a project in school, about the UN Global Goals.
Part of our project is trying to implement a bee program in our school. At the moment we are still at the planning stage and we would like to know about how we would be able to have a beehive in our school. If you could please provide us with information or direct us to a website where we may be able to get the required research to do this project.
Thank You
Kind Regards
Amrit Jessy and David Duff
Today we also did research to find these emails as we couldn’t find where the information is. This showed problem solving.
Did you consider the fact that 5% – 7.5% of the worlds population are allergic to bees?
If you were to install bee hives then people who are allergic to bees (Like my Mum) would not send there children to All Saints’. And most people who end up with bee allergies are not born with them, the more they are stung the worse the reaction. So you would be increasing the percentage of anaphylactic reactions to bees.
Thank you Thomas for your increasing concern.
As above we have thought about this greatly and do not believe our choice of location will increase contact.
From David.
Thank you Thomas for your concern. This is a startling fact, so of course we thought about how we might minimize accidental contact. So we took care when thinking about the location we took this information into careful consideration. We decided that the location that we put the bees should be in the corner of the school. Far away from any person that may come across it when exploring. We will also make sure that the near area around the beehives are surrounded in a fence to prevent people from getting to near the bees if they might bee allergic.
From David.
Did you consider the health risks that this may cause?
Thank you Patrick for your concern. Indeed we did. When thinking about the location we took this information into careful consideration. We decided that the location that we put the bees should be in the corner of the school. Far away from any person that may come across it when exploring. We will also make sure that the near area around the beehives are surrounded in a fence to prevent people from getting to near the bees if they might bee allergic.
From David.
But the bees would surely be able to fly out of this fence, in which case they would be able to attack students and pose a health risk.
Thank you Patrick for your increasing concern in this matter. We have taken great care with the placement and believe that we do not have a high chance of this happening with the distances.
From David.
And just how do you know that?
Sometimes many people must make educated guess work. And we guess that bees would go to areas with flowers, and these are not in huge numbers around the school.
I do believe that bees will fly away, and if you were to keep them in a cage then that would be animal cruelty.
Please see my earlier comment to Patrick about this interesting matter.