Making It
Celebrating Jewish community with honey from Bee Awesome
9/30/2022 | 4m 11sVideo has Closed Captions
Rabbinat Amalia Haas became hooked on beekeeping and providing the community with honey.
Beachwood resident Amalia Haas saw an opportunity to educate children in her community on the basics of nature with a focus on pollination and bees, and she began building the foundation for her company, Bee Awesome. She found an experienced beekeeper to set up hives at her home and quickly became hooked.
Making It
Celebrating Jewish community with honey from Bee Awesome
9/30/2022 | 4m 11sVideo has Closed Captions
Beachwood resident Amalia Haas saw an opportunity to educate children in her community on the basics of nature with a focus on pollination and bees, and she began building the foundation for her company, Bee Awesome. She found an experienced beekeeper to set up hives at her home and quickly became hooked.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship(gentle music) - And I somehow, as a beekeeper have the privilege of being able to look in on this incredibly complex world, I was just swept away.
It was like falling in love with an incredibly complex process.
(gentle music) My name is Amalia Haas and I am the founder and CEO.
Sometimes I say the chief bee whisperer at Bee Awesome.
Bee Awesome provides educational programming about pollinators and the environment and the climate with a special focus on bees and for a certain section of the year a lot of my work focuses on Judaism and the bees, because the Jewish new year is celebrated with honey and I am part of the Jewish community.
So there's a real interest in that.
A hive needs several things to happen successfully in order to be able to produce honey.
One thing that a hive needs is it needs enough bees and that requires having a healthy queen.
Usually there's one queen in a hive and she during the growing season will lay anywhere between two and 3000 eggs a day and that is what establishes the population of the hive.
The majority of the bees are female, but they're not egg layers and so their job is to do everything else.
They create the wax and they build the comb.
They raise those young that the queen lays.
They defend the hive from invaders.
During most of the year they're are also the third cast of the hive is called the drones and those are the males and those don't do active work in the hive, but obviously they're needed for reproduction of the species at large.
That's a smaller population of the hive.
What they also need is all the ingredients that sustain life.
They need water.
They need a protein source, which for bees is pollen and they also need an energy source, which for bees is nectar.
A lot of the work of the hive is actually dehydrating that nectar so that it becomes honey.
It's a neat experience to be a Jewish beekeeper, because there is a specific time of year, which is before the Jewish new year, which happens in the fall where the whole Jewish community really all around the world traditionally takes apples and dips them in honey and says the Hebrew phrase (foreign language) which means may it be a sweet and good new year and then eats that apple with some honey on it.
As a beekeeper, I'm joining a human natural connection that goes back for thousands of years.
And the hive has been always viewed as a source of healing.
I love it.
I really do.
I love the teaching and the appreciation that people show for local honey is very special.
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