BEE SWARMING OCCURRENCE AT SDI

This week, the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI) staff and student interns experienced the natural phenomenon of bee swarming. “It was awesome watching nature in action”, Manih Boyd, student and Administrative Assistant stated after watching the bee swarm fly towards the wooded area behind the campus.

Bees swarming on Birdhouse

Swarming occurs when a new bee colony is formed. The queen bee leaves the colony with a large number of worker bees. Approximately 60 percent of the worker bees join the queen to leave the hive. Swarming usually happens in the spring and is the natural means of reproduction of honey bee colonies.

As part of a summer project, the Place-based Opportunities for Sustainable Outcomes and High Hopes (POSOH) students, a cohort group comprised of high school students and student interns, put up a bluebird house near the SDI garden. About two hours after the birdhouse was up, the students noticed an extremely large amount of bees clinging to the birdhouse. For the next 24 hours scout bees flew looking for a new location for the swarm to live. Upon finding an appropriate spot, they came back to the swarm and perform a dance to indicate direction and distance to the new location. Once a new spot had been agreed upon by the swarm, they flew to the new area.

Menominee Language Class - Helping Sustain a Nation

Fellow classmate Dale Kakkak learns vocab for articles of clothing.

Menominee Language class meets every Tuesday at 6pm. This is one of the highlights of my week. The purpose of the class is to learn and practice Menominee, but sometimes it seems as though I learn more about Menominee culture, myself, and my community through the language.  Keeping the language alive is an important aspect to community health and culture -- not to mention, an important aspect of sustainability.

Menominee Language, like many American Indian languages, can reveal a lot about ways of thinking and of life. It brings history alive in ways that books, movies, and artifacts can't. In Menominee language class, I learn about the different ways words are cataloged and defined. For example, unlike in English, objects in Menominee may be animate and inanimate depending on what is defined as "alive" or "not alive." Words and definitions may differ in certain contexts. Think of the following examples: a tree limb, a limb broken off from a tree, a stone, a stone used in ceremony, or a stick a dog is playing with. In which of these cases is the piece of wood or stone living? Language class allows me to see and speak of objects in a new way that can't be done in another language.

I've had fun learning the different months and what each time of the year means. Though there are different ways to say November, it is most often "Pākatāhkamekat-kēsoq" and refers to "freezing ground". (And there are far more words for 'snow' in Menominee than there are in English.) February, Namāepen-kēsoq, translates to "sucker fish-moon".

Last class, a classmate asked how to say "I read" in Menominee, which was interesting, because Menominee was always a spoken language. Today, the Menominee way to say "I read" is "wētan," which translates more literally to "It is telling." It is instances like this where I get to understand more about culture and history and less about learning vocabulary, (though vocabulary can be fun too). My favorite word we've learned thus far is the word for cup, "kuapenakaehsaeh."

If you would like to join in the roundtable class, “Conversational Menominee” is offered every Tuesday night in the College of Menominee Nation Culture Building at the Keshena campus. Ron Corn is the instructor (follow his twitter handle here! @wapemen)

To watch a great Menominee Language story, check out this video by "The Ways".

Article written by SDI Social Media Coordinator Julie Edler.