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For These Teens, a Unique Beekeeping Program Teaches About Much More Than Honey
June 1, 2023
Spending 15 weeks surrounded by bees wasn’t Maria Roman’s plan for the summer. The New Haven, Connecticut-based teenager was going through a lot when a family friend suggested she participate in the Huneebee Project, a beekeeper-in-residence program that offers young people the chance to interact with bees while learning essential life skills.
Roman had recently entered the foster care system and found herself drifting away from things she once loved, such as spending time outside. She recalls thinking, “You seriously want me to be around bees? Definitely not.”
With no prior pollinator experience, Roman was apprehensive. “I knew they stung and to get away from them if they’re close to you.” But by her fifth week in the program, Roman had warmed up to the bees, finding them therapeutic.
In the news
‘Hidden Magic’: Bees Help New Haven Youth Overcome Anxiety and Gain Job Skills
December 7, 2022
Taylor, a social worker with experience in the foster care system, said she started the Huneebee Project due to “a combination of my own burnout, my own frustration and disheartenment from the systems that I was working within, and then my own discovery of beekeeping as a personal refuge and personal means of healing.’
Taylor initially sought to establish a beeswax candle company that would teach youth to work with their hands and follow a product from creation to sale, she said.
That vision changed as she got to know the local beekeeping community.
Beekeeping Sweetens Arthur Street
June 22, 2021
For those who participated in the visit to the Huneebee Project Saturday and Sunday, it was a fascinating dive into bee biology, plant sex, and the big wonders that can come from small green spaces in a city.
Founded in 2018 by clinical social worker and beekeeper Sarah Taylor, the Huneebee Project is both a community garden and youth employment program. It runs 11 hives and three pollinator gardens in New Haven-area community gardens. It also runs a four-month-long therapeutic job skills training program to create beekeepers in residence, and has graduated three cohorts of students who have taken positions as junior garden site managers, bee apprentices, and peer instructors. It sells some of its products through an online store. On Saturday, Taylor and several Huneebee Project staff were on hand to walk about a dozen curious novices through the science and practice of keeping bees.
Beekeeping Project Wins “Unsung Heroes” Award
May 18, 2021
“The Huneebee Project trains five or six teenagers in each annual four-month cohort who install beehives placed in gardens throughout the city. Youth go on to become Project employees, positions that include maintaining the hives, developing and marketing honey-based products, and managing community generated hive sponsorships. The Project sells honey harvested from its bees and beeswax candles from the wax cappings of the honey frames.
The Unsung Heroes Award was created in 1993 and is funded by friends and admirers of the late Morris Wessel, a pediatrician, and Irmgard Wessel, a clinical social worker and community activist, to continue their decades-long efforts to make New Haven a better place for all its residents.”
Marina Marchese Of Red Bee Honey, Huneebee Project + A Bee’s Knees Cocktail
This week on Seasoned, Marina Marchese of Red Bee Honey in Weston teaches us how honeybees make honey through their amazing coordination and communication. We also talk to Sarah Taylor, the founder of Huneebee Project, a social enterprise bringing beehives to community gardens and vacant green spaces in New Haven. Bee Instructor Sophia Lafargue and two teen beekeepers in the program share their experiences working with bees and making honey. Finally, two pros share a few delicious ways with honey, including of course, a classic Bees Knees cocktail.
Atticus/Chabaso Joins Forces With Foodie Start-Ups
May 2, 2021
The CT Food Launchpad will be run out of the soon-to-open Atticus Market at 771 Orange St. The first two “startups” for the program are Huneebee Project and Sanctuary Kitchen...
Last Thursday’s event — the delivery of the sample bags, then the online session — offered a taste of what the CT Food Launchpad has in store.
The bright Atticus bag on my doorstep boasted three products from the organizations involved so far. A salted honey tart was designed to feature the flavors of Huneebee honey without exhausting its limited supply.
With New Culinary Launchpad, Food Entrepreneurs Join Forces
February 26, 2021
For Huneebee, the opportunity came just as the group branched into product development with the release of its fermented garlic honey. Sarah Taylor, founder and executive director of Huneebee Project, said that it made perfect sense to work with Atticus: Huneebee’s growth has always come from the community..
But Huneebee didn’t sell any honey-based baked goods at the time. Alongside the bakers at Atticus, the group had to develop a product that would showcase the honey without draining the seasonal honey supply. In the end, the tart won out. The sifted spelt shell has a honey-cream filling and is topped off with pink Himalayan salt.
Huneebee Project Thrives Two Years Later
December 4, 2020
Founded in 2018, the venture aims to provide transferable job skills training and employment to youth between the ages of 15 and 23 with past or present child protective or foster care involvement through beekeeping.
Two years later, the program has graduated three cohorts from its Beekeepers in Residence program and installed 11 honey bee colonies in community gardens on James Street in Fair Haven and Arthur street in the Hill. It also launched an online marketplace in 2019.”
Busy Bees
July 27, 2020
…like Dillan, Alex and their peers, Taylor “never ever ever” expected to keep bees. The closest she thought she’d get was a hobby of making candles from beeswax. But once she followed the wax to its source, there was no turning back. “I was hooked from the moment I first heard about what it was like to keep bees,” she says. She got her first two hives and “began to realize pretty quickly that being with bees and the whole process of lighting the smoker and being in the bee suit and opening up the hive was [an] escape for me.” That seemed odd, until she spoke to other beekeepers. They, too, described time spent with their hives as something akin to a “spiritual practice.”
Inspiring Stories: Savannah of Huneebee Project
June 24, 2020
“Huneebee project has opened me up to something I’d never thought I would be doing, let alone wanting to start my own. When I’m well and ready, I plan to run a small garden of my own with my boyfriend called “The Coping Garden,” with my own hives, flowers, and vegetables galore. A small place in which people can relax, destress, and feel that same relief and have the same experience I had when I first stepped in the garden. Therapeutic is how I would describe it. And, of course, empowering.”
Bee, Student Debt, Video Entrepreneurs Pitch
December 5, 2019
Sarah Taylor turned her own personal experience with beekeeping as a healing and empowering activity into the Huneebee Project, aimed at offering training and employment in beekeeping and the creative arts to local child protective and foster care involved youth. A social worker by training, Tayloremploys clinical social workers as mentors in her project as well as beekeepers, who she found have “a delicate intensity that created a joyful, wholesome, and hopeful environment.” Currently selling honey, seed packs and local artists’ vases online, Taylor is hoping to open a brick and mortar business to employ graduates of the program which is ready to begin its third cohort and is hoping to double its number of hives by next year. “We are working on putting the power back into the youths’ hands,” she said, and encouraged those present to sponsor, donate and share.
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