June 15, 2011 | Update!

Habana life: strawberries, architecture, and bee larvae!

Time for a round of updates on what’s going on around here - USBK, the bees, the gardens!

USBK UPDATE:

Our USBK project is coming along - after a few long weeks of promoting, recruiting and planning we now have a wonderful mix of 9 bright, young architecture and design students from all over the city and state to participate! The team is quite diverse... we've got builders, thinkers, designers, and researchers who are all coming together to help create a beautiful, working outdoor rainwater collection system for Uncommon Charter School, Leadership Prep - to go along with the gardens we'll be putting on their property. It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks finishing up the plans for the program!

So far, we have a great line-up of people for the students to meet and hear speak such as Cook+Fox, Lower East Side Ecology Center, Perkins + Will, Urban Acres, and many others! Also, we’re planning some fun field trips to architecture exhibits and beautiful sustainable gardens around NYC.

GARDEN UPDATE:
We have just planted some flowers and strawberries in our Wildlife Habitat at Kid’s Corner! They’re in Wooly Pockets hanging on our fence - at perfect height for picking, touching, and smelling! You may have also noticed a winding vine crawling up the fence near the corner -  those, my friends, are hops. Apparently it only takes a couple of ounces of hops to make a keg, so we're on our way to making one special batch of Habana Beer. We'll come up with a better name for it than that...

BEE UPDATE:

As for the bees, we were really worried for a little while that the HOT HOT weather was going to affect them negatively. Luckily the air cooled off these past few days! It may have taken them a while, but the bees have come around and we've noticed eggs and larvae in their comb. That's a really good sign! Especially because our queen recently took a tumble into the top feeder and was found drowning in the water there. We scooped her up, gave her mouth to mouth (not really - we actually just put her in a dry place and watched her to make sure she was ok) and saved her little bee life in the nick of time. 

She is repaying us by making lots of baby bees and soon, many jars of honey.