West Patent Students Are Busy Bees as They Prep for the School Honey Sale

“I can’t believe the bees make all of this!” a West Patent Elementary School fourth grader exclaimed while watching golden honey drip slowly into a glass jar.

West Patent students spent a week learning about bees and extracting, jarring, packaging, and selling honey from the school’s hives as part of its Week of Service observing 9/11.

“WPES's annual 9/11 Week of Service is unlike traditional community service,” Principal Inas Morsi-Hogans said. “Our school community gathers to harvest honey from our hives—a hands-on project that reflects our schoolwide commitment to service learning.”

Money earned from the sale of honey will go to school enrichment funds and to BluePath, an organization the school partners with and that is where the school’s service dog, Jacey, is from.

“Service learning is deeply embedded in our curriculum: it blends integrated instruction, reflection, and meaningful action,” Morsi-Hogans said. “Through this particular project, students study ecological stewardship, collaborate on sustainable harvesting, and think about their personal connection to the broader community. Our service-learning efforts center around our partnership with BluePath, honoring Jacey by teaching students empathy, social responsibility, and community care in deeply connected, real-world ways.”

While preparing for their honey sale, students worked on each part of the process.

Some students donned beekeeping suits (which they noted made them look like astronauts) and went out to the hives, getting up close to the bees as they worked.

“I hear a lot of buzzing! And I smell the honey!” a first-grade student exclaimed while peeking into a hive.

“I love how you made an observation,” answered tiered support teacher Alison Muller.  “Wow, he’s really using his senses!”

Inside the STEAM room, students also took part in extracting honey.

“This is called a frame,” tiered support teacher Kathleen Keenan said. “As you can see, I did some scraping already. Do you see all of this beautiful, sweet honey?” She flipped the frame to show students what it looked like before scraping. “On this side, we have capped honey. We’re going to scrape the wax that the bees put there to get to the honey.”

Once there was enough honey in the bucket, it was time to move to the extractor—a big metal tub with a handle that students got to spin around and around.

“Centrifugal force moves all the honey to the bottom,” Keenan explained.

Later, fourth graders took part in jarring the honey, adding stickers and branding. Students also made shopping bags, created signs, and wrote morning announcements to advertise their sale.

In addition to the honey, the school sold candles made from the wax. Nurse Maria Reino told students that some of the candles were made from molds from the 1700s—a fact that they found incredible.

Throughout the experience, students learned across subject areas: from clapping to see how many syllables are in extractor to talking about hexagons, learning about honeybees, and reading stories about them.

A special shout-out to Alison Muller, Maria Reino, Kathleen Keenan, and Jackie Smith, whose vision and hard work make these transformative learning experiences possible for ALL WPES students!