This year for our FLL project challenge we had to identify a problem when people and animals interact, design a solution that makes the interaction better for animals, people, or both and then share our problem and solution with others. Our team chose to research and learn more about the interactions between humans and the honey bee.

​

Did you know that the honey bee helps to pollinate 1/3 of the crops we eat.  Without the honey bee a delicious dinner of steak, broccoli, carrots, baked potato and salad with the fixins' would be a baked potato and lettuce! 

​

Because the honey bee plays such a vital role in our food supply we wanted to find out what we could do to help the honey bees. Almost all honey bees are cared for by bee keepers so we thought talking with bee keepers would be a good place to start. 

​

We interviewed several bee keepers and discovered that the bee smoker is the bee keepers best friend! In order for the bee keepers to help the bees they must enter the bee hives. This can be very stressful for the bees and so the smoke from the smoker is used to help keep the bees calm and reduce the stress from opening the hive. 

​

A problem, though, with the bee smoker is that it can be very hard to keep lit long enough for the bee keepers to maintain all their hives. We bought our own bee smoker and gathered some pine straw to learn how the smoker works. Pine straw is  the favorite fuel of bee keepers because it lights easily and it burns a cool smoke. Our pine straw only stayed lit for 30 minutes! That is a problem!

 

Our mission then was to find a fuel that would burn slow, would be easy to light, and inexpensive in order to help keep the smoker lit for long periods of time.

​

In our quest to find a fuel solution we found where people were using shredded paper as a fuel to heat their homes. We wondered if something like that would work in our bee smoker. So we made one with shredded paper and tested it in the smoker. The fuel patty burned for 1 hour and 15 minutes! That was twice as long as the pine straw! We call our solution "Bee Friendly Fuel" or a.k.a. BFF. 

​

We tested several ourselves including a larger size that we hoped would burn longer. The larger one didn't burn longer but it did get hotter. The smoke from the larger one is too hot for the honey bees.

​

We shared our idea with the members of the Alamance County Bee Keepers Association during their November meeting. We asked several of them to burn the BFF in their smoker and give feedback about it through the survey on our website. So far the results have been positive! Geoff Leister invited us to his apiary to test the BFF on his bees. The smoke from the BFF worked to keep the bees calm. 

​

We hope that this idea of using recycled paper in a new way will help bee keepers as they care for the honey bees.

​

Check out this UnBEElievable idea! Directions on how to make BFF below.

​