Ouiska Run Farm sets up beehive-painting contest for Silver Creek HS students
Apr. 6—SELLERSBURG — Ouiska Run Farm is working with Silver Creek High School on a beehive-box-painting contest for the junior and senior art students.
Jeff Kennedy, Ouiska Run Farm's co-owner, reached out to Ruth Dowling, Silver Creek High School's art teacher, to set up the contest.
Kennedy wanted this contest to help spread awareness about the decline in pollinator quality and habitat. Dowling has a strong feeling about the problems that pollinators are facing right now and saw this as a prime opportunity for her students to be aware of those issues.
Students in the competition will be painting beehive boxes provided by Ouiska Run Farm; 25 students are participating.
"Art is a very big part of out branding and our creativity, we like to embrace art," Kennedy said. "I think that that generation (gen Z), are newly adults now, are starting to have some awareness about the negative effects that we've been doing to the Earth in the last 20 or 30 years."
The students will have a few weeks to paint the beehives and a ceremony will follow for the three students with the most votes sometime in May. They will also have complete freedom over whatever they want to paint on their beehive boxes.
Some ideas the students have are painting characters from the "Bee Movie," honeycombs and more.
"They're looking for any form of canvas," Dowling said. "This was a fun way for it to be unique and they loved that it was going to a good cause and raising awareness of the bees."
When the contest is over, Kennedy will put the beehive boxes in his field at Ouiska Run Farm.
To help pollinators, people can plant native flowers and refrain from spraying their yards for weeds.
Kennedy suggests for those who want to help pollinators to create what he calls a pollinator island where people have native flowers growing, and butterflies and bees can pass through and pollinate.
As of now, Silver Creek High School does not have a pollinator garden but it is something that Dowling is interested in getting started.
"With all the renovations that we have coming up in the next few years... my classroom will be facing a courtyard that I'll be sharing with the science department," Dowling said. "Initially the administration wanted to cement the whole thing."
Dowling and the science teachers talked with the administration to keep it a green space that they will help take care of.
"We absolutely have plans for having pollinator-type things because especially around they school, there's just not a ton of anything really that helps the pollinators," Dowling said.
