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Tania Grgurich: Creating a Buzz

Tania Grgurich, a clinical professor of diagnostic imaging at Quinnipiac University, is literally creating a buzz on the institution’s North Haven campus with the introduction of a beekeeping program.

Beekeeping, also known as apiculture, has fascinated Tania since childhood, and “the fact that beekeepers would go into a beehive and be able to see all the intricacies of the hives,” she says. She realized her hopes of practicing beekeeping, starting in 2020, when she gathered all the necessary equipment and hives to establish a bee culture at her home.

She brought this practice to an underutilized green space at the university along the surrounding woods lines, where there is now a habitat for an estimated 500,000 honey bees spread through eight hives.

“I love it, and I’m so lucky to have been able to do this. Quinnipiac has been super helpful,” says Tania.

As part of the program, students learn about how important of a practice beekeeping is from both a biodiversity and sustainability perspective. Essentially, they will be educated on how integral honeybees are to the ecosystem, just starting in Connecting, where “there are hundreds of species of pollinators,” says Tania.

“Honey bees are extremely important pollinators. There are so many different crops that rely on not only honeybees but other species. A third of the food that we eat has been pollinated by some of these beneficial pollinators, and honeybees are just some of them,” she says. “We need them to survive, and without them, we wouldn’t have food.”

The location of the beehives at the university is ideal since its surroundings include ponds, which, critically, provide a water source for bees.

“The bees can land on the soil that’s surrounding the ponds and get a drink without worrying about falling in,” Tania says.

Because a huge component in this part of study is educating the students on “being stewards of nature to help those pollinators,” sometimes creative solutions are also required. Because “a water source is extremely important because bees can’t swim,” Other means need to be thought of by the students. Tania raises an example of a solution, which can be “a bird bath with some pebbles and some water that would encourage them to be able to land on the pebbles and drink from that without drowning.”

Then, there’s also removing the fear factor of constantly being surrounded by bees, which is very important for students.

“A lot of times, the kids are going to run away if they see a honeybee because maybe they’ve been stung by a yellow jacket or something else,” Tania says. “They’re not there to hurt us like a yellow jacket.”

For their non-predatory nature and ecological importance, Tania says students need to learn to “respect them” as part of our environment.

Overall, Tania also says the program looks to “promote an environment that’s going to encourage them to inhabit and then to give them a safe place to live and also forage,” which includes “planting some flowers that are native, that are helpful for the honeybees and then even some of our other pollinators.”

Aside from the science aspect, the beekeeping program includes a collaborative project between its students and the Quinnipiac School of Business. This sees students coming up with their own business plan for the honey that is cultivated at the hives.

“Eventually, they would like to be able to sell the honey, come up with basically some labeling for the honey, a sales plan, even talking about profits and losses,” says Tania.

Tania herself already has some experience in this department. In early August, she harvested 70 pounds of honey from the hives on campus, donating 15 pounds of what was called by students “Quinni-bee-ac Honey” to the university.

She said this was so “they could sell it and use that money to put back into the program.”

She says future goals of the program include embracing student leadership and its focus on community engagement, such as working with students from Hamden and North Haven and continuing to make the program sustainable for years to come.

Tania is also looking to see the establishment of a bee club at Quinnipiac that is open to students “from any discipline.”

“We’re hoping to get that established very soon because we do have a lot of students that are interested, and if they’re not taking the class, they may not necessarily have the opportunity to work in the beehives, so this will give students outside of that course the opportunity to do that.”