Meroby Elementary School fourth-grade students Edward Conlogue, in green shirt, and Alaric Skehan, in black shirt, listen as 2024 American Honey Princess Lainey Bell tells them about honeybees and her job as the American Honey Princess, sponsored by the American Beekeeping Federation. Marianne Hutchinson/Rumford Falls Times

MEXICO — Nineteen-year-old Lainey Bell of Winslow, the 2024 American Honey Princess, spoke Tuesday to students at Meroby Elementary School in Mexico and Rumford Elementary School, sharing her knowledge about bees and how important they are to our environment.

Wearing a tiara and standing at the front of the fourth-grade classrooms, Bell talked to the students about the bees’ anatomy. She shared lots of information about bees, such as that “there are actually between 50,000 to 70,000 bees in a hive in the middle of the summer,” she said. The queen bee is the only bee in the entire hive who can lay eggs, she added, and that “depending on the time of the year, (the queen bee) will lay between 1,000 and 3,000 eggs every single day.” Bell also told the students about the bees’ two stomachs; one for digesting and the other one for making honey.

She was very excited to be with the students that day, she said, and her title and job as American Honey Princess, sponsored by the American Beekeeping Federation, “is to travel around the entire country and talk to people about honey and about honeybees,” which she loves to do, she said.

Bell also works at Swan’s Honey in Albion, the largest apiary in Maine, with between 3,000 to 4,000 hives the company is responsible for. During the colder months, Swan’s bees are shipped to Georgia, where they stay until May when it’s warm enough to bring them back to Maine where they can make honey again.

“But they usually don’t last too long (in Maine) because we send them all across New England to pollinate different fruits and vegetables as well as to collect different nectars,” she said.

The fourth-grade students at Meroby Elementary School and Rumford Elementary School have been learning this year about bees and beekeeping since they are part of the MV Bees Academy, which is a self-sustaining apiary program located just off 58 Highland Terrace, that offers local honey, queen bees and crafts made by Regional School Unit 10 students to the Mountain Valley community, as well as beekeeping experiences.

Honey is poured into a settler in fourth-grade teacher Maggie Corlett’s classroom Thursday at Meroby Elementary School. Fourth-grade students at MES and Rumford Elementary School listened to presentations from 2024 American Honey Princess Lainey Bell, who told them about honeybees and her job as the American Honey Princess, sponsored by the American Beekeeping Federation. Marianne Hutchinson/Rumford Falls Times