Over the summer, due to extreme weather conditions and flash flooding, science teacher Kelly Prickett’s bees for her wildlife science class passed away.
While mourning the loss of her original bees, who had been there longer than her, Prickett started to try and find a solution to the lack of bees.
“We received a grant from the Education Foundation, and it was called Elevate,” Prickett said. “They offer grants every quarter, and there’s a form you fill out online and it’s available to all teachers in the DeSoto School District. They ask you a ton of different questions, and then they go through rounds of deciding who gets grants. And fortunately, we were chosen.”
While the grant provided a solution to the problem, it wasn’t cleared until second semester, so the wildlife science class had no hands-on experience. While this transition period was hard on some students, junior Emerson Tran held out hope for the new bees.
“I was pretty sad, but I was excited, because that meant that we got to start like a new hive,” Tran said.
With the grant, the class received 20,000 bees to start a new hive with, and students, like junior Addi Price, had to work hard in order to prepare for the arrival of the bees.
“We painted the boxes for the bees to live in, and I thought that was really fun. We also built the boxes ourselves, with lots of hammering, and gave them sugar water when we finally got them.” Price said.
Even with all the hardships of losing the bees and trying to get new one, Prickett is excited to get the class more involved with the bees, and seeing future classes get to interact with them too.
“I’m really excited to get this up and going again,” Prickett said. “It’s a really valuable resource and I’m excited too, because the enrollment for next year has increased, so I’ll get to spread the awareness of bees and get students out there even more next year. The students this year have done an awesome job getting the hive ready. They painted it, decorated it. It looks beautiful, and they have their first experience out there, so I’m excited to get them out there again.”
