Weekly Reflection 2

Alex Muromcew

Senior Project

5/12/19

One of the highlights was receiving a tour of Island Creek Oysters from Skip Bennett. He is the president of the company and was kind enough to give us a tour of the farm before the official opening date for tours. Perhaps it was because he is a Proctor alumnus. The tour he gave was very comprehensive and showed us the full process that he goes through to have a constant harvest of oysters and some other aquaculture.

This week had a lot of time that was spent preparing for our projects taking flight next week. The lobster traps have taken up a good amount of time. We had to assemble, tie, and paint buoys to reach the stage that we are at now. Next week we will drop them in the water near Hingham. The bee hives so far have been a ton of work however at each step we learn and we grow more and more excited to have bees of our own. We have taken every step needed and then some to prepare for what we need. Since Tommy will be taking care of these bees well beyond senior project, we both wanted to make sure we do a good job of preparing ourselves for taking care of the bees. Most of our time has been spent assembling, painting, and prepping space for the hives. Assembling and painting was definitely the most time intensive as we have two hives instead of just one, but that definitely made things more interesting for us as we each had our own full hive to build and paint. Preparing the garden was also a time consuming activity. What I learned from Tommy is that having the hives elevated will help the bees defend against predators, and will also help in finding more sunlight exposure to the boxes. The following week, we will be moving into the phase where we own and nurture bees.