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REAP Center Honey Harvest Festival

The REAP Climate Center, in partnership with Bay Beehives, hosted a Honey Harvest Festival this past Saturday, November 4. Visitors had the opportunity to craft homes for native bees using logs and to extract honey from REAP’s hives.

Alameda Post - small trailers and buildings at the REAP Climate Center
REAP Climate Center. Photo Kelsey Goeres.

REAP—Regeneration, Education, Aquaculture, and Permaculture—is a nonprofit campus/hub for deploying nature as infrastructure, housed on a half-mile-long lot at 2133 Tynan Ave., near the Posey Tube.

When the center’s founder and executive director, Jonathan DeLong, got access to the property almost three years ago, there was nothing on the lot other than piles of litter and brush. Today, the long strip with a dirt path down the middle features a myriad of well-organized stations for various climate projects and education, all decked out in brightly colored pastels.



About REAP

The REAP Center website states their mission as: “Supporting scalable, nature-based solutions to mitigate climate change while also supporting the health and resilience of our planet’s ecosystems.” Locally, the goals are a bit less daunting.

“Ultimately, we’re just trying to get people engaged with nature and maybe find a pathway to jobs,”  DeLong told the Alameda Post.

Alameda Post - a dirt road in between houses and office buildings
This dirt road cuts through the middle of half-mile long REAP Climate Center campus. Photo Kelsey Goeres.

DeLong came to climate work from ocean policy. He also has experience in the justice, social, and tech spaces. But he got to a point in his climate work where he grew weary of Zoom calls. He wanted to get his hands dirty.

“Growing up in the Bay Area as a dyslexic, justice-impacted youth, I was really an experiential learning kind of guy,” he said. “I remember transitioning to climate work and wondering, ‘Where’s that place I can go to get my hands in?’ I found myself in endless loops of Zoom calls and I was like ‘I want to do a thing. I want to physically do a thing.’ So the vision of this came into play.”

Alameda Post - bee boxes at the REAP Climate Center
Bay Beehives beehives at REAP Climate Center. The Webster Street Tube ventilation building is in the background. Photo Kelsey Goeres.

Bay Beehives

REAP also gives a home to other local third-party organizations, including Bay Beehives, a hands-on bee conservation organization that specializes in “immersive lessons on sustainable beekeeping practices.”

“Pollinators are a keystone element for the survival of our species,” said DeLong. “Honey bees are of European descent and they’re not native to our land here. But we really built them as a critical element with a dependency on our food system. They’re not going away, but we have to look at them in concert with our native species.”

In his black vest with gold bees stitched buzzing about, DeLong explained that, sometimes, when people or businesses attempt to house bees on their properties, they fail to set up the environment with the necessary native plants around to keep the pollinators well fed. But this sort of education is available at REAP, next to the native bees habitat workshop.

“Planting species with different blooming times provides pollen and nectar for insects throughout the seasons,” reads one of the flyers on the table next to the station. “Bees can get out of sync with the flowers that support them due to climate change.”

Alameda Post - a log with holes drilled into it for a bee home
A native bee home. Photo Kelsey Goeres.

Honey Harvest

Under a white tent, three people diligently drilled different sized holes for different sized bees into logs, being careful to not puncture the wood all the way through. Two people dusted the holes with mini pipe cleaners to clear the new homes of any debris.

Onsite nearby, a group of musicians jammed to rock songs. The group included a couple of ukuleles, a violin, guitars, bongo drums, and a tambourine. They went over the notes of the song before jumping in so everyone was on the same page. A few Harvest Fest wanderers took a seat in the shade to enjoy the music along with their bee-themed snacks.

Over at the honey extraction station, I stuck my fingers into two different hive frames—one translucent yellow, the other a green-brown. The honey tasted sweet and bright. To extract the liquid, the Bay Beehives specialists began by scraping the wax caps off the honeycombs with a hot metal knife. Then, they took the frames and placed them into a big metal drum called a honey extractor that spun the frames, causing the honey to fall out of their wax cells. Once all the honey had dripped down to the bottom of the drum, it could be bottled and enjoyed.

California Climate Action Corps Fellow Sophia Strena said that, although this is the final honey harvest of the year, the REAP Center and Bay Beehives members are sure to leave some honey-filled frames in the hives because that’s what the bees will eat throughout the winter.

“The seasons are slowing down,” Strena said. “This is the last honey harvest of the season. The bees are going more dormant, so that’s why this is the time for the festival. The world is slowing down and going to sleep, so we can slow down and enjoy the honey with each other. That’s just really enriching.”

Kelsey Goeres is a contributing writer for the Alameda Post. Contact her via [email protected]. Her writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Kelsey-Goeres.

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