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Beekeeping, A New/Old SC Career
By S. Mary Bodde

S. Helen Therese Scasny began beekeeping this spring at her home in Bedford, Ohio.

Because she likes to try something new and different, S. Helen Therese Scasny began beekeeping this spring. “It’s a great educational outdoor activity,” she says. It is well suited to the five acres of SC Community property where she lives in Bedford, Ohio. Besides helping her vegetable/flower garden, she added, “I felt I could make a difference by introducing a colony of bees in a time when the wild bee population is in jeopardy.”

In April S. Helen received a queen and about 360 bees. “Today [mid-July] I have a wonderful hardworking queen and about 60,000 worker bees.” (A queen lays 2,000 eggs each day that mature into worker bees.) “The queen and workers are all female – notice who does all the work!” she adds.

Every two days in Bedford, you can see S. Helen, wearing a veil, white shirt and gloves, pouring a quart of water into the 4-foot-high hive. Every two to three weeks she tends the hive – freeing antibiotics if the hive becomes infected. In S. Helen’s experience bees are very gentle and she is very gentle with them.

Her hive holds nine frames that will each be loaded with five pounds of wax and honey. The wax is cut off with a large knife and the honey is strained and drained into jars.

“Extracting honey will be work at the end of July,” S. Helen said. “The remaining summer months (August through September) will be taken up with preparing the bees for the winter and their survival,” she stated.

That includes leaving 70 pounds of honey in the hive for their food, and covering the hive, which is in a secluded area, against the cold. Hives have to be kept at 90 degrees.

“Bees keep warm by flapping their wings very fast in the winter,” S. Helen explained, “and their rapid wing movements cool the hives in the summer. They do a great job in pollinating the garden besides producing a crop of delicious homegrown honey.”

“I’m excited about my new hobby,” she adds, “because so much of God is in nature, and my bees – my ‘little girls’ – are teaching me more about the awesomeness of God!”

S. Rose Anthony Olberding took care of a number of bee hives on Motherhouse grounds from 1940 until 1944.

Beekeeping is not new to the Sisters of Charity. As head of the English Department at the College of Mount St. Joseph, S. Rose Anthony Olberding also was given charge of the Motherhouse grounds in the late 1930s. She took a correspondence course in beekeeping, and from 1940 until 1944, she took care of a number of hives that were located behind the greenhouse.

College students would see her during noon hour wearing a huge wide-brimmed straw hat on top of her cap and veil. From this flowed netting that covered her to the waist; she also wore gloves. She was a great one for talking to the bees as she worked – and startling faculty when she appeared fresh from the hives at faculty meetings.

 

 

 

 

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