Welcome to the MV Bees Apiary
The MV Bees Academy is a self-sustaining apiary program, offering local honey, queen bees and crafts made by RSU 10 students to the Mountain Valley community, as well as beekeeping experiences.
Located just off 58 Highland Terrace where the new K-8 school is being constructed, the public is invited to see the MV Beekeepers at the apiary on the first Saturday of every month beginning around noon.
The website (https://sites.google.com/rsu10.org/mvbees) says, “See inside a hive and learn about beekeeping. We probably have a suit that will fit you. “
Now in their second year, the MV Bees began with a RREV (Rethinking Responsive Education Ventures) grant through the Maine Department of Education. It provided the money to build a building and apiary site, safety gear, equipment and honey bees for their program.
This is the second full school year of Meroby’s beekeeping class. This fall, fourth graders from Rumford Elementary joined in. The two schools now share the same principal in Jodi Ellis.
Meroby fourth grade teacher Maggie Corlett had considered leaving teaching to become a beekeeper. Now, she shares her passion with hundreds of students. In her classroom, her students learn lessons from the apiary in agriculture, food production and economics. They bottle the honey and also craft it into lip balm and candles. They sell their goods online to re-invest all proceeds back into the bee program.
Each time students come into the apiary enclosure, a beekeeper is there to teach, guide and facilitate their experience.
The ultimate goal is that all students from RSU 10 will have opportunities to engage with the bees, benefitting from this purposeful endeavor.
To provide for the financial needs of maintaining an apiary, the MV Bees offers the sale of honey, queen bees, and crafts made by students. This allows for the purchase of things like mite treatments, sugar for feeding the bees, and equipment replacement.
FMI about the products, contact Maggie Corlett at mcorlett@rsy10.org.
Corlett’s passion for beekeeping extends beyond the school, In July, she visited Ludden Memorial Library in Dixfield talk about the MV Bees.
Her audience earned about the differences between the worker bees, drones and the queens and about what the bees do in the hive and how honey is made. Corlett also brought a teaching hive to show the audience what the inside of the hive looked like and what the different boxes are used for.
The website also noted that beekeepers are needed to assist students on school days, during school hours, and to assist with hive management and beekeeping activities that cannot be done when the students are present. Those interested are asked to contact Maggie Corlett (mcorlett@rsu10.org) or Lacey Todd (ltodd@rsu10.org).
Meroby fourth grade teacher Maggie Corlett visited Ludden Memorial Library in Dixfield in July to talk about the MV Bees.
