Honeybee Research Earns Ocean County Teen National Honor, Spot In MIT Program

TOMS RIVER, NJ — When Kaitlyn Culbert was about 7 years old, she sat on the beach in Cape May, sketching horseshoe crabs that she found washed up on the beach.

“There were tons of horseshoe crabs that washed up on the beach,” her mother, Christina, said. “Katie proceeded to collect like 8-10 of them” and spent hours sketching instead of playing on the beach.

“Not the most pleasant smell as you could imagine,” Christina said, “but that is when I discovered she really loves science.”

Ten years later, Kaitlyn’s passion for science and experiments has continued to grow and has garnered her a number of awards and honors, including a statewide environmental honor in December.

Now, she’s won a national award and earned a place in an elite research program. Kaitlyn is one of 34 students around the United States to receive a President’s Environmental Youth Award, and one of 60 U.S. high school juniors to gain a place in an eight-week research program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kaitlyn, a junior at Toms River High School North, is a student in the school’s Authentic Science Research program and has been conducting research on honeybees.

“I applied for the presidential award after I won my governor’s award,” Kaitlyn said in a recent phone interview. “I was honestly really shocked when I got it.”

The President’s Environmental Youth Award, established by the Environmental Education Act of 1970. recognizes outstanding community-level environmental projects by K-12 youth that promote awareness of natural resources and encourages positive community involvement.

Kaitlyn was the honoree from EPA Region 2, for her honeybee research and her efforts to educate the public about honeybees and to protect them. Her work includes becoming a certified beekeeper and establishing hives at Jakes Branch Park in Beachwood, where the public can view and learn about the bees. She also has a YouTube channel where she interviews people about their work in STEM disciplines, to give other students a view into the possible career paths.

“We are thrilled to honor the crucial work that students and teachers are doing in every corner of our nation,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan. “Our awardees represent bold and dedicated leaders who are ready to tackle the biggest climate challenges, and we are so grateful for their commitment to environmental education. Congratulations to all the award winners – we can’t wait to see what you do next.”

Kaitlyn said she became a certified beekeeper because of her research project that looked at the effects of Varroa mites, which are the main threat to honeybees, and ways to deter the mites using essential oils.

She got interested in studying honeybees during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she came across a pollinator challenge that talked about colony collapse disorder.

“Being part of the Garden State, I knew how important honeybees are,” Kaitlyn said. She formulated a research proposal through the challenge, but ran into some difficulties.

“I really wanted to do a field study,” she said, but because she had no experience in beekeeping and didn’t have any family members who were involved, beekeepers were worried about the potential for damage to their colonies.

She turned to an incubator study instead, using honeybee pupae and larvae, along with mites, provided by Rutgers University.

That project won her awards at the 2020 AEOP (Army Education Outreach Program) National Science Challenge, and the Delaware Valley Science Fair as a freshman, and for the last two years she has been a finalist at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, the world’s largest science competition for high school students.

She also has had papers on her research published in scientific journals.

It was at the Regeneron fair her sophomore year that she learned about the MIT research program, from another student who told her she should apply. The program is only open to high school juniors, and accepts 100 students — 60 from the United States and 40 international students.

The eight-week program starts at the end of June and goes through the first week of August. She will live on campus at MIT and be paired with a researcher at the university, The program concludes with the students writing papers on their research and presenting it to a panel that includes faculty from Harvard and MIT and past Nobel laureates.

The timing of the program overlaps with the awards ceremony for the Presidential Environmental Youth Award, so Kaitlyn will not be able to attend that event in Washington, D.C.

Christina Culbert said they are hoping the regional EPA administrator will be able to come meet Kaitlyn and see the work that has been done at Jakes Branch Park with her hives — there are about 120,000 bees in her colony, she said — and the 2,500-square-foot pollinator garden that supports the bees.

Kaitlyn created the 4-H Busy Bees Beekeeping Club and leads it, and it was club members along with 4-H Teens and the Master Gardeners who raised the funding for the pollinator garden, which was established two years ago. The club members maintain the garden.

“I’m really passionate about the pollinator garden,” Kaitlyn said. She’s also passionate about educating others, both kids and adults, about what they can do to help not only honeybees but other native bees that help with pollinating the various crops that are the essence of the Garden State.

Her passion and public outreach work also have earned her the title of New Jersey Honey Queen for 2023, providing additional opportunities to speak and educate about the state’s native bees. While honeybees get top billing, Kaitlyn said there are other bees that play a role as pollinators.

“Most of the native bees are solitary bees,” she said. “They don’t live in a giant colony.” Humans can help those bees through things such as a “Bee Hotel,” a collection of small tubes that provide a place for the bees to lay their eggs. Mason bees and carpenter bees both benefit from that, she said, and it can deter carpenter bees from boring holes in wood decks and such.

Bumble bees — “Everyone loves bumble bees,” Kaitlyn said — are social and live in colonies usually underground.

Kaitlyn said she also tries to educate people about the difference between honeybees and yellowjackets, which look similar but are actually members of the wasp family. They can be a problem for honeybees, because yellowjackets like to steal the honeybees’ honey, she said.

The trip to MIT will be a chance to see the campus and other colleges in the Boston area, but she has not decided what she wants to do beyond high school or college yet.

Scientific research is high on her list of priorities, however, not surprising for a young woman whose first science memory is of conducting an experiment for her fourth grade science project, seeking to see if Bounty’s advertising claim of being stronger than other paper towels held up. (Her conclusion, by the way, was “Bounty was the best by far.”)

“I’ve just always been really intrigued by science,” Kaitlyn said.

Kaitlyn will be at a honey harvest on June 21 at the Rutgers Bee Yard in Cream Ridge in her role as NJ Honey Queen and student leader of the 4-H Busy Bees Beekeeping Club.