Bees un-Laoised on Leeside
There’s a buzz about Cork lately as a UCC student has been using beekeeping to teach mindfulness to vulnerable young people in a Cork city school.
Sarah Kearney, a fourth year Social Work student at UCC, has introduced beehives to help students at Cork City Learning Support Centre to develop skills for life within and beyond the classroom. A third of Ireland's bees could be extinct by 2030.
Sarah, from Laois, who has spent years tending to her own bee hives, says the careful pace of beekeeping taught her the importance of mindfulness, helping her to manage stress and even overcome her fear of water.
“I’ve learned a lot of coping skills while managing hives. You have to be emotionally regulated; you can’t get panicked or run away – they’ll come after you,” she joked.
She added: “As a beekeeper, you have to go at a slow pace. I wasn’t, at the start – it was all rush, rush, rush. It was only through practicing that I learned the benefit of mindfulness.”
During her undergraduate course work placement, Sarah was keen to try a fresh and fun way of engaging her students, aged 13 to 23, many of whom are from war-torn countries, and all of whom are, sadly, processing some form of trauma.
A year-and-a-half ago, with protective suits for each student and epi-pens at the ready, Sarah introduced the first beehive – containing 120,000 bees – to the school. Thus began a journey that has proven transformative for the students.
From tending to the hives on the roof, to building the bee-boxes and creating a special garden to help the bees to thrive, this has become a labour of love for Sarah’s class.
She said: “The hive is a community, and that’s helping the young people to realise that they’re not on their own; they’re not the only ones going through this experience, and by doing it together they might be able to achieve something.
“Things will happen over the year with the beehive, you lose a queen, a hive gets sick. It’s a way of teaching kids that things happen in life, but there are ways of working around it, you can focus on the positive over the negative.”