Workers also collect and store pollen, the bee’s protein source.Īguilar’s ECOSF farm honey is legendary in Glen Park for its sweetness and is sold at an after school SFUSD/ECOSF partnership Farmer’s Market where the proceeds go to ECOSF. Scouting for nectar, worker bees live on the average 15-38 days in the summer, while the queen can live as long as one to two years. Worker bees fly in, depositing nectar that is fashioned into pure honey. Kai saw bouncer bees guarding the hive, while worker bees feed larvae, clean the hive and care for the queen. Kai ensures his leather gloves fit correctly. He continued that an agreement, a “contract,” be consensually promulgated in which individuals surrender their natural liberty to create a general will based on community.Īs Kai would observe, bees - that bundle flying solo with living in concert - very well may have a wing up on us as we continue piloting through the coronavirus crisis. Rousseau posited in 1762, the same year he penned Emile, that no one person is entitled to have natural authority over others. Frenchman Rousseau may even have been thinking of beehives when he authored The Social Contract, a benchmark of any civics curriculum and a treatise that serves well in these polarized and health challenged times. In fact, a hive is a combination Greek polis, military barrack, funeral parlor, airport and a well-run hotel. “It’s a shelter from the elements, a nursery for their babies and food storage of honey and pollen foraged by worker bees up to three to four miles from the hives.” “The hive holds all that the honeybees need to survive,” instructed Aguilar, who is a board member for the San Francisco Beekeeper Association. Mentor and mentee positioned themselves behind the stacked boxes in what soon morphed into an outdoor classroom. The number drops to 10,000 in the winter. They do this to make room inside the hive for added ventilation.Īguilar’s bees number 50,000 in four boxes in the summer. Bearding refers to bees gathering at the front of the hive, in a beard-like shape. “They gather as a method to thermoregulate inside hive temperature thus eliminating crowding.” Bees “bearding” outside their hive. “It’s a hot day so the bees are ‘bearding’ outside of the hive,” Aguilar explained. “I’ve been stung 50 times,” Aguilar joked over his shoulder. Hundreds of bees hugged the boxes, signaling they might swarm. While doing so, he explained the goings on of the “super” or main hive and the individual frames where honey is produced. He clad Kai in a protective mask and bee suit, then wrapped duct tape around the boy’s jeans hems. Aguilar held up a pristine hive frame he’d taken from a green box and informed Kai what to expect when they’d move to the hive. They were surrounded by the tools and gear of beekeeping. Standing by his truck tailgate, he and Kai suited up preparatory to the afternoon’s hive inspection. He also stewards bees on Ripley Street near his Bernal Heights home and at the College Hill Learning Center. When Aguilar isn’t jogging at the former McAteer track, he has made it a ten-year hobby to oversee beehives as near as Glen Park and as far as the Mendocino Boys Club Camp. Kai, 15, is an inquisitive sophomore at International High School who finds insects fascinating Aguilar, 63, is a PG&E Senior Consulting Project Manager who supervises electric transmission projects such as the substation rebuild on the corner of Glen Park’s Rousseau Street.Īs in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French Enlightenment philosopher who in 1762 wrote Emile, a book about a hypothetical 16-year old boy raised in the healthy and natural countryside and taken under the wing of a tutor who could lead him through novel learning experiences. Kai, together with his mother, arrived promptly at noon. He was waiting for the arrival Kai Tong whom he’d arranged to mentor. He unlocked it, got back in and drove to his beehive on the campus of the former of McAteer High School.Īguilar, Class of 1976, tends a hive housed several yards from the football field. A few minutes before noon on August 28, Fernando Aguilar closed the door of his pickup and walked to the O’Shaughnessy Blvd gate of his alma mater.
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