Rose Bialk/The Mossy Log
On Saturday, Sept. 20, Students Engaged in Eco-Defense (SEED) club hosted their first honey harvest of the year. The honey harvest has been an annual event for the past four years and helps to promote student involvement in the hives on campus and ecological awareness in both the Portland area and the wider world. Located on the Lewis & Clark Graduate Campus, the beehives were initially installed in 2020, while the surrounding bee garden and beekeepers’ shed were built in the following years. The 2025 honey harvest was set to the backdrop of gorgeously-warm weather with a clear sky and the smell of flowers and honey wafting through the air. Students mingled around the hives and snacked on fresh fruit, cheeses and, of course, fresh honey laid out at a small table.
I asked some of the SEED volunteers and other club members about the harvest’s impact on the wider student body.
Gwyn Murphy-Cunningham ’26, the head beekeeper, stated, “I feel like it’s the event that we’re most known for at this point, which we love, I’m really glad the bees get this moment to shine.”
She was not wrong with this statement — there were well over 20 students in attendance at the event at any given time, not including the students affiliated with SEED. Many people participated in bee-themed Kahoot games, while others investigated the hives and Bee Garden or enjoyed tea sweetened with freshly-harvested honey.
Murphy-Cunningham has only been recently hired as head beekeeper, so this is her first year managing the hives. She has picked up the job impressively well, and is settling into the social demands of working with the hives with a clear ease. During the Saturday harvest, Murphy-Cunningham demonstrated the function of SEED’s flow hives to onlookers.
The standard method of beekeeping requires harvesters to smoke out the hives and remove each frame of the honeycomb individually in order to clear them of bees. These frames are then placed in a centrifuge to remove all of the sticky sweetness. This process can take a long while and though it does not actively hurt the bees, it is definitely invasive and interrupts their daily routine. The flow hives, a more recent investment by the beekeeping group, have a base matrix that the bees are able to build wax on top of. The bees then fill the created pockets with honey and cap off each section with more wax to protect the honey for storage. Once the bees fill the cells with honey, harvesters can turn a key to rotate the base matrix and create a channel which the honey will flow down through so they can collect it. This noninvasive and quick method of harvesting honey speeds up the process for SEED beekeepers and has allowed the harvest to be a more community-focused event.
Murphy-Cunningham spoke to the way the harvesting process has changed over the years.
“I feel we’ve just gotten more skilled at harvesting. The first couple of years we did it, it was a little difficult, a little messy, definitely a learning curve with using the flow boxes,” she said.
Another change to the hives and surrounding areas was the gardens — in the past few years, SEED members have been working hard to introduce native pollinator favorites to the area, creating a bee garden that is both aesthetically pleasing and a source of nectar for the bees. Murphy-Cunningham and Emma Johnson ’26, another beekeeper with SEED, both hope to expand the garden further this fall and have plans to collaborate with Native Student Union to introduce ethnobotanically-significant plants to the space. This plan will make the surrounding area even more inviting for LC students and will help feed the bees in the hives as well as other native pollinators.
The honey harvest was a lovely experience that I would highly recommend to any LC student looking to get outdoors and into the sunshine. The combination of interesting information on the honey-harvesting process and efforts to connect with local culture, alongside a genuinely warm atmosphere created a space that felt comfortable and inviting. SEED will continue to host events throughout the year, so keep an eye out for posters and enjoy the wonderful space that they have created.
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