For the past few years, Chateauguay Valley Regional High School (CVR) has been working on a green initiative to help make the campus more eco-friendly. A few years ago, Kaylie Stuckey, who was the Chateauguay Valley Career Education Centre (CVCEC) coordinator for CVR at the time, received a grant to put in a beehive at CVR. She already knew how to run a hive, and worked with Brandon Borland, a teacher at CVR, and the science department to get the project off the ground.
Since the project started, it has been an on-and-off process. “There are some hurdles when it comes to using the hive, especially since we have to keep the hive on the roof of our school,” Borland explains. There have been concerns about vandalism and the safety of an accessible hive; keeping it on the roof helps with those concerns. At one point, they lost a hive, which is a fairly common problem, but when more grants came in, they were able to replace it. “We have some ideas to make it more interactive in the future, funding permitting,” he adds.
Projects like this are a great tool for education. There are parts of the science curriculum and now the Quebec construction curriculum (CCQ) that focus on environmentalism. Borland explains, “We learn about things like invasive species and then native species and then non-native species … Adults are always surprised to learn that honeybees are not native at all to North America. They have a really hard time here.” Having these hives gives a visual example to the students learning about these concepts. “You get a lot of kids that are just kind of amazed that we’ve got an animal here that isn’t native, but it’s just so good for pollination and the environment,” he says.
Not only is it good for the students, but having a hive on campus is great for the environment around them. “It’s really good for the pollination around the campus. That was one of the big reasons why we got started,” Borland says. As a part of this project, the school also has six gardens at the back of the school with different plants, to make sure that there are flowers that are healthy for the bees to pollinate.
Though the hive hasn’t really been producing honey in the past couple years, Borland hopes that they may get some this year. The last time they had large amounts of honey was 2024, which they were able to give it to members of the staff as a gift for Staff Appreciation Week. They use the honey they currently have in cooking classes at CVR, and they recently sold a little at a local farmer’s market.
It’s important to Borland to highlight how this project continues to be possible. This project would not still be going on without the help of CVR’s Community Learning Centre coordinator, Lorelei Muller. The school is also trying to set up more environmental initiatives, including a greenhouse club and a project with Tree Canada where trees will be donated to CVR.