Bees are coming to Dickinson, and their presence could help transform Carlisle into a regional beekeeping hub.

After getting approval from both the borough of Carlisle and the college this summer, The Hive, a beekeeping collective recently created on campus, has already prepared a site on which to house an apiary that it will run. The group is now awaiting the bees’ arrival on campus, which will be winter break at the latest, due to the most recent development of a split-rail fence to keep children from getting to the bees.  This fence was finished last week at the corner of North and College Streets, where the bees will be located.

“We’ve already purchased the bees, and they’re currently living at [local beekeeper] Tracy Alsedek’s house in Harrisburg. We’ve just been waiting until we have things such as a fence to move the bees onto campus,” says Marcus Welker, sustainability projects coordinator for the Center for Sustainability Education.

The idea to bring a working apiary to campus was begun in Fall 2015, when Rowan Price ’18 proposed to the Idea Fund the idea of putting an apiary on campus. The project was approved, and John Leibundgut ’18 was brought on board as the Idea Fund project consultant, along with Marcus Welker, who served as the faculty advisor.

The project has since moved away from the Idea Fund, and is now being funded by CSE.

“[The Idea Fund] was going to loan The Hive money, but it turned out that it was going to be more money than we expected, and it made more sense for CSE to handle it through their budget,” says Leibundgut, who is now head beekeeper of the Hive, with Price off campus for the semester.

The organization of the Hive will be similar to that of the Handlebar, in that it will be operated by CSE interns alongside various levels of volunteers. Volunteers will need to be trained, but the amount of training one needs depends on his or her level of involvement.

“We don’t want people who just want to check out the Hive to do a lot of training, but we want them to also go into knowing what their risk is and knowing what to do in the case of an emergency,” says Welker. The more involved a student wishes to be, the more training will be necessary, he says.

In addition to teaching students how to take care of bees, the Hive will also be used as a sort of living laboratory by classes and professors to learn about sustainability problems and solutions through direct experience.

The Hive comes to campus just as seven species of yellow-faced bees native to Hawaii have been added to the endangered species list, according to NPR. Although the bees that are coming to campus are not yellow-faced bees, but honeybees, the Hive may serve to promote conversations on campus around the topic of bee conservation.

“Bees are critical for our ecosystems to function,” says Welker. “My hope is that this group of people will move beyond just simply honeybees and be thinking more broadly about other types of bees. Honeybees are one avenue to get people thinking about [preserving and protecting the environment].”