The Secret Life of Syracuse Bees

Written by Anya Sywulak | Photography by Erica Legaard

Meet the honey bee. Golden yellow and brown with fluffy, oval bodies, honey bees are responsible for pollinating a third of all our food. Unfortunately, honey bee populations have been on the decline in recent years. It’s not looking good for these adorable pollinators. Without honey bees, we could see some of our favorite produce disappearing from grocery store shelves. Imagine a world with no almonds, cherries, blueberries or cucumbers. Luckily for us foodies, people are working to save the bees, including some at Syracuse University. In 2019, public health professor Lisa OlsonGugerty had an idea to bring honey bees to Syracuse University. With help from the Campus as a Lab for Sustainability (CALS) Grant, six hives were placed on SU’s South Campus containing about 300,000 bees. Proposed to start in the Spring of 2020, Olsen-Gugerty said the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench in her plans. Despite all that, the SU honey bees still had a pretty successful first year, and that first batch of honey sold out in a matter of weeks.

“The bees are gathering the majority of their spring honey from Linden and basswood trees, and so the honey has a very distinct color and smell and taste. It's pale, pale yellow, like golden with a green hue to it and it smells like menthol. The first time I opened up the spinner…it was just a big waft of like a menthol cough drop, it is the most amazing, delicious and unique scent. And then you taste it and it's just amazing.” Olsen-Gugerty says of the honey. Last year, the hives produced seven and a half gallons of honey in the spring and another five in the fall. Spring and fall honey tastes different, so I would recommend trying to get your hands on a bottle of both before it all sells out. 2021 was an unseasonably wet summer where the bees tended to stay indoors, but hopefully in future seasons the yield will be larger and there will be more honey to go around. But the honey and the bees are just a small part of a much larger sustainability plan being put in motion at SU. As the sustainability coordinator for the university, Meg Lowe was able to get the school registered with Bee Campus USA, an initiative by the Xerces Society. The name is a little bit misleading, as you don’t actually need bees to participate. The goals of the program are to increase quantities of native plants, provide nesting sites for native pollinators, and reduce the use of harmful pesticides. “When we looked at the campus, what we found was that there were a lot of similarities for the requirements and things that we were already doing, which is why it was so easy. We didn't have to reinvent the wheel. It was one of those things where we're like, well, we're already

doing this, why aren't we getting credit for doing this?” Lowe says of the affiliation with the program. The only thing left to do was create a native wildflower garden. She applied for a grant from the Xerces Society to receive 750 native wildflower plugs, and in 2021 planted a beautiful garden by the carriage house on South Campus. If you’re interested in growing some native plants yourself, Lowe and the sustainability team hand out herb seeds and a little container to plant them in to students on the promenade in the spring! She hopes to make that a tradition, so look out for them when the weather is nice.

In an ideal world, Lowe wishes all of campus could blossom with native flowers. “An echinacea is just gorgeous [as a tulip]. You know, European flowers are really pretty and the lilac is the state flower. Yeah, that's European and it's not native New York.” Although many, myself included, look forward to the tulips that pop up on campus in the spring, filling the campus with more pollinator-friendly flowers would benefit everyone in the long run. Lisa Olsen-Gugerty is also looking towards a future SU campus that is more bee-friendly. She is already increasing her operation to eight hives for the next season, but in her master plan there would be observation hives in the Falk building where you can see into the honeycomb structure the bees are building, as well as hives throughout main campus. She would also love to see enough bees to create a honey house and student bee club. To those who may be afraid of having that many bees flying around, OlsenGugerty says this:

All proceeds from the SU honey go right back into sustainability management at the university. Syracuse University has a goal to be completely carbon neutral by 2040 and Meg Low thinks “we're on a really good path to make those improvements happen in a way that is fiscally responsible and socially responsible as well.” By purchasing the $12 honey, you are supporting our school’s efforts in being a leader in climate sustainability, as well as enjoying a flavor that is also native to our lovely orange university.