Students get hands-on experience in new beekeeping and apiary management course

Students in Fanshawe’s new Continuing Education course in Beekeeping and Apiary Management recently visited the College’s teaching apiary for the first time, gaining hands-on experience with active colonies. 

The course, which launched last month and runs through early August, combines equal parts classroom learning and field instruction to cover the fundamentals of beekeeping while exploring the critical role honeybees play in agriculture, food production and environmental sustainability. 

During their first field session, students practised foundational skills that help beekeepers assess colony health and make informed management decisions throughout the season, including identifying queens, workers and drones and learning to read hive frames for eggs, brood, food stores and signs of queen activity.  

Future visits to the apiary will provide opportunities for students to handle frames, observe bee behaviour at hive entrances, assess colony health and discuss pathways into both hobby and commercial beekeeping.  

Professor Graham Thompson, who has 25 years of experience working with bees, says launching the course has been “a real highlight.” 

“The students’ engagement has been remarkable – many arrive with little or no beekeeping experience, and within a few sessions they are confidently working alongside tens of thousands of bees, asking sophisticated questions about colony biology, agriculture and environmental change,” says Thompson. “It’s exciting to see them connect what happens inside a single hive to the larger agri-food systems that support our region.” 

Established in 2019, the College’s apiary has approximately six production hives which are home to an estimated 60,000 to more than 200,000 bees depending on the season. Over the years, with the help of various volunteer beekeepers, the apiary has enriched student learning from building the hives and researching the healing properties of honey to analyzing how bee pollen changes throughout the year and using the harvested honey in recipes. 

Listen to Graham’s interview with CBC’s London Morning. 

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