Cedar Creek Corrections Center in Littlerock, Washington is a minimum security prison that houses approximately 500 inmates. The superintendent of the facility, Mrs. Hisami Yoshida, is dedicated to making the institution more eco-friendly by supporting many “green” programs, one of which is beekeeping. Beekeeping is a unique program for prisoners to be involved in, as I am unaware of any other prisons that have a program to the scale that we have (Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Aberdeen just started up a small bee program modeled on ours). Cedar Creek has increased the size of our beekeeping program by partnering with The Evergreen State College. This partnership provided the prison with a biologist to teach us the biology side of beekeeping and scientific method. I have been caring for the bees since my arrival here almost 3 years ago. The involvement of the biologist and the addition of the new colonies that were brought in this year have been an excellent learning experience for me. I had never kept bees before coming to prison. I’ve found it fascinating, satisfying work, and have learned a whole lot. I was primarily trained by one of the correctional counselors, Vicki Briggs, caring for the three hives we had before the partnership with the college. She is a hobby beekeeper herself and as a counselor here she became the staff member who managed the bees. We made some splits in the spring with the two colonies that survived the winter and had a total of eight colonies. One of our colonies had an extremely prolific queen. We also had been making lotion and lip balm products with the wax from the hives here. When Evergreen arrived they brought in an additional 21 colonies (in 4-frame nucs). Ten interested inmates that signed up were included in the two-day a week class held by the Biologist Sam Hapke. We were taught the technical aspects of beekeeping and a lot of bee biology. We learned how to graft, check for Varroa destructor, and check for tracheal mites with a microscope. We also learned many treatment strategies for bee parasites, both chemical and organic. However, in practice we only used the organic techniques here. We also got a lot of face time with the bees so we are more comfortable around them. I always wore a suit for the first year in the program. However, I discovered that I tended to get stung more when wearing one. I’d had bees fire off like missiles into my bee suit through a gap in the zipper. I had about 30 bees flying around in my veil one day and probably 200 more trying to get in. We were pinching them through the mesh to kill them. Another time I had the bees so angry at me they were stinging right through my socks. On many other occasions we would be chased all the way back to the units after removing our bee suits. It was suggested I try not using the gloves and see how it went. I now rarely wear a suit. I hardly ever get stung anymore. I’m a lot more careful when and how I handle the bees and get immediate feedback if I’m being too rough. We’ve learned that different colonies have different personalities. Some are just plain mean; so I put the gloves and suit on. Others are rather docile and don’t seem to mind when we go through the hive. We have two apiaries—an upper one and a lower one. The lower one seems to have conditions that make most of the colonies down there a bit more aggressive. We often refer to this one as “The Wild Bunch”. It’s a covered apiary and in a small valley surrounded by trees, so it gets less sun. We’re thinking that may be the reason the bees are meaner there, but the jury’s still out on that one. We also started taking comb measurements, extensive field notes, and ran experiments with Kenyan bar hives. Since bar hives are not easily found for purchase, they were made here at the prison by inmates in the maintenance shops. Actually, almost everything we use in the bee program here is made at the prison by inmates, including the more common Langstroth hives. We still have a large amount of those types of colonies. We will be comparing winter survival in these versus the bar hives. We made extensive notes on all of the colonies whenever we worked a particular hive. We would note how well the colony was building up, how aggressive the bees were being, and how well they were holding up to invasion by wasps and baldface hornets. We had a particularly bad time with wasp and hornet invasions this year; we lost a couple of bar hive colonies because of this. The first sign a colony was going to abscond was they would stop laying, stop storing nectar and pollen, and the comb would start to empty out. Then, they would all just take off. Nothing would be left behind but empty comb. This was suicide for the bees this late in the season (this happened in late August), but apparently they felt they would not have made it if they stayed. I had never seen so many of these predator insects after our bees. The prison is in the middle of the woods in SW Washington State, so there is a lot of habitat for these types of insects. We purchased some yellowjacket traps and placed them all around the apiary. This helped to reduce the yellowjacket numbers a great deal. These traps lured the yellowjackets in with an attractant specific to them, so not a single honey bee was trapped. However, the traps did not work on the baldfaced hornets, so we spent considerable time manually squashing them every day we were out in the apiary. Eventually, I made some traps out of plastic pop and water bottles and baited them with tuna juice. This worked to lure in all the predator insects and again did not attract honey bees. In hindsight, traps should have been put out sooner. For feeding the Langstroth hive colonies, we started by simply placing a feeder bag on top of the frames. After several weeks of this, I found it was quite wasteful. We had a lot of empty Zip-Loc Bags to dispose of. So, I obtained a quantity of #10 tin cans from the facility kitchen and added an empty hive body to the top of the Langstroth hives to contain the feeder can. This saved us money by not having to buy commercially made feeders. We would throw a bunch of scrap wood pieces and a screen from a bee package in the can to give the bees something to crawl out on. We used a similar method to feed our bar hive colonies, as well by placing the feeding can behind the divider. These methods worked beautifully and we had very few bees drowning after I added the screen with the sticks. This was also another way to recycle; since Cedar Creek is a model prison when it comes to sustainability. Cedar Creek practices sustainability efforts with many “green” programs to teach us about environmental responsibility. In addition to our bee program, we also have a worm farm/compost, multiple organic gardens and greenhouses, endangered Oregon spotted frog hatchery, and rainwater cisterns. All of these sustainability programs are what are considered by us to be the most desirable jobs to have in the prison and are the most sought after. During the winter months this last year we made about a thousand lip balms and nine hundred hand balms with the surplus wax from our colonies last summer. Several interested inmates, including myself, make these products in correctional counselor Briggs’s office. We use a pretty simple formula 1:5 for our lip balm and 1:6 for our hand balm. Just beeswax, olive oil, and flavoring or scent, depending on what we’re making. For lip balm flavoring we purchase essential oil or flavoring oils for baking. Last year we made lippy lime, lemon peppermint, cherry peppermint, cherry lemon, peppermint, alluring almond, lemon almond, and my personal favorite, cherry almond. For hand balm we would use essential oils, candle scent oil, or baking flavoring oil. Last year we made almond, vanilla bean, tangy tangerine, piña colada, lime, and my favorite, vanilla tangerine. Our bee products are given away at family-friendly events (we have several family-oriented events every year that are geared toward our children, ie: science fair, back to school, etc). In addition, our products are given away to the volunteers around the holidays and at our Volunteer Appreciation banquet every year. Our bee program is truly unique. It provides something positive for us do, think about, and talk about while incarcerated. It also gives us something to look forward to every week as well. This program is something we actually want to participate in. It’s a positive activity I can take home with me. This is a program that we as inmates greatly benefit from. The Department of Corrections benefits by providing programming for us and production of bee products for use here in the kitchen and for other programs. The Evergreen State College benefits by gathering data and experience for their graduate students. Therefore, everyone benefits from these programs by working together to meet their needs with less cost to the taxpayers.