The bright sun blazing. The buffalo chicken emanates. The patio is filled with hungry students. The four year wait is worth it to experience the outdoor weather while the underclassmen remain in the cafeteria.
However, there is something else that surrounds those on the senior patio. They make a buzzing sound, have yellow and black stripes and love sweet and sugary food.
When senior Peyton Ware first sits down at lunch, the first thing that comes to his mind is looking out for the black and yellow devils.
“I usually eat my lunch as fast as possible before the bees can attack my lunch,” Ware says. “After I speed through my lunch, I usually use my senior incentive to leave lunch and go somewhere else around the building, rather than staying on the patio.”
The bees cause seniors to avoid use the patio, forced to eat lunch in the cafeteria or in an another teacher’s classroom.
Some seniors are sorely disappointed.
“I looked forward to the patio last year because the lunchroom got too rowdy,” senior Landon Peck says. “But it isn’t much improvement because of the bees ruining the lunch environment.”
Contributing factors, such as trash, flowers and sugary food attract bees’ attention. The patio is home to flowers near the back, but the bees seem to buzz their way toward student lunch trays. The bees love humid and hot weather, so this time of the year is bee season.
However, the world that exists today would not be the same without bees. According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), more than 90 percent of leading global crop types are visited by bees. This means nearly all the food humans consume can be grown thanks to bees.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suggests several ways to keep bees aways, including never leaving food out beyond meal time, cleaning up sticky and syrupy drinks immediately, keeping trash cans covered and keeping areas dry.
As of now, there are no trash cans on the patio. If there were, students would have easier access to a clean patio and decrease the attention of bees toward food.
“My allergy makes it really difficult to enjoy the senior patio”, says senior Logan Jones. “I always have to watch for bees and the people who aggravate them because that is when the bees try to sting.”
Bees are one of the most important producers on Earth’s environment, but when it comes to school, they harm students and make lunch difficult. The number one priority for the school should be students safety and the groups of bees on the patio make it an undesirable environment.