By Katy Savage, Standard Staff
Sydney Main captures bees in the palm of her hand, up to three at a time and strikes up conversation.
She asks them where their queen is. She tells them they’re going to like their new home, in the boxes in her backyard.
“I talk to bees. I speak bee and duck and chicken and dog and fish and turtle,” she said.
Sydney, 8, isn’t your average farmer. She carries the chicken she calls Fluffball in a doll stroller around the yard. Fluffball goes in the house and even has her own photo- shoots (Sydney is also a photographer).
Sydney is lively and talkative with an imagination as big as any 8 year old.
To her, the thousands of bees buzzing around the family farm in Weathersfield are just pets; no different from her two dogs, two ducks, flock of chickens, turtles and fish. She talks to all of them.
“She’s very into the animals,” her mother, Amy Beth Main said.
Sydney lives on Green Root Farm; the Mains’ 10-acre hobby farm. This is Sydney’s classroom.
Sydney, a second-grade student, has been homeschooled for the past two years.
After attending kindergarten at the private Waldorf School in Quechee, her parents wanted her to have a nature-based education, free from standardized test scores.
The beehives are in the yard beside the apple trees Sydney wanted at age 4, beside Sydney’s flower garden, where she’s planted tulips, and next to her vegetable garden where she grows green beans, chives, black berries, raspberries, radishes and cucumbers. She documents what she learns to earn school credit through Oak Meadow, a Brattleboro-based company that sells homeschool curriculums.
“A lot of things in the curriculum is just how we live,” said Amy Beth, who does the teaching.
Both Sydney’s parents stay at home with her and her younger brother, Mason. Amy Beth worked in the medical field and Ron was a mechanic.
The young beekeeper is quick to tell you all she knows about bees. She went to a Vermont Beekeepers Association meeting last year. Sydney was the only kid there at age 7.
Back at home, Sydney watches worker bees enter the hive with yellow pollen on their legs.
“Sometimes I think they’re not collecting nectar, they’re sleeping and they’re snoring and they don’t want anybody to hear them,” she said. Green Root Farm has grown with Sydney’s age and years in school. They started selling honey last year. The bee business is the result of a homeschool project gone overboard. It would have sufficed Sydney’s homeschool curriculum to watch bees pollinate out the window.
“We got a hive instead,” her mom said.
The Mains have seven hives now. Sydney helped her dad build the bee boxes and paint them bright colors earlier this year, knocking off art and craftsmanship skills from the lesson plans.
On this day, the blond-haired girl wore pigtails and was dressed in pink from her shirt to her shoes.
She shows off her bedroom, which will soon be painted camouflage. Her bathroom has yellow walls and there are pictures of bees on the bathmat and shower curtain. Sydney counts the bathroom as its own hive.
“That means in total we have eight beehives,” she said.
School is “boringgg,” Sydney said. But she lights up when she talks about wilderness camps. “It’s so. Much. Fun,” she said.
She’s tracked fox prints around the snow in the yard and she keeps a tally of the types of birds that come to her bird feeder.
Her mom doesn’t know if farming is in Sydney’s future. But for now, “As a family it’s been something we all enjoyed,” Amy Beth said.
This article first appeared in the June 16, 2016 edition of the Vermont Standard.