Bees and Beekeeping Unit Study

We started this study in February after one of the kids asked to read The Bee Tree at story time.  It’s about a little girl who complains of being tired of reading, so her Grandpa takes her on an adventure chasing after a bee to find the bee tree and their wild honey.  This story led Ronnie to look up some bee videos on YouTube.  That got everybody fascinated with these amazing insects that God created.

 

We checked out our usual assortment of books from the library, watched some videos, made some real-life observations, took a semi-field trip, and summarized what we learned on a “science-fair” style tri-fold display board.

BOOKS

Two good books for the beginning to mid-level reader or the preschool listener, with good basic information…

 

 

 

The Honey Makers

by Gail Gibbons

 

 

 

 

honey bees

by Deborah Heiligman

 

 

 

Several at what I would call the preschool level.  We didn’t get through all of them because we read the two books above first, and these basically repeated all the same information.

 

 

Are You A Bee?

by Judy Allen and Tudor Humphries

 

 

 

 

 

Bees!

by Elizabeth Winchester

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bees: A True Book

by Larry Brimner

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bee

by Karen Hartley

 

 

 

 

For the more advanced reader, this one goes into greater detail, especially about how bees turn the nectar into honey.

 

 

 

How Bees Make Honey

by Micheal Chinery

 

 

 

 

And a book intended for adults, but one that captured by 7-year- old’s interest enough that I ended buying our own copy to keep.  He says he wants to be a beekeeper when he grows up.  Who knows?  The author of this book says his interest in beekeeping started when he saw a presentation about it when he was in elementary school…

 

 

 

Beekeeping for Dummies

by Howland Blackiston.

 

 

 

 

And a couple of character building books that were given or loaned to me by older homeschooling moms…

 

 Buzz Bee

by Ethel Barrett

The story of a worker bee who becomes discontented at being “only a worker” and rebels against the authority of the queen, only to learn that it really is better to follow God’s design for authority.

 

A Hive of Busy Bees

by Effie Williams

Here’s the description from www.cbd.com

Don and Joyce are invited to spend the summer with their grandparents at the farm. Each day presents exciting opportunities for them to experience outdoor farm life-so different from the city-especially the first day when they encounter a hive of angry bees. From this episode grandma chooses stories from her scrapbook and skillfully develops some character lessons for each evening bedtime BEESTORY.

Contents: Bee Obedient; Bee Honest; Bee Truthful; Bee Kind; Bee Polite; Bee Gentle; Bee Helpful; Bee Careful; Bee Grateful; Bee Loving; Bee Accepted; Bee Confident; Bee Content.

 

I can always tell when a book is a “hit” with my kids : they pick it (repeatedly) for story time, or they pick it up and continue reading on ahead of where I stopped when reading it out loud.  This, along with the Gail Gibbons book, is one of them.

VIDEOS

We watched part of Tales from the Hive produced by Nova.  I found it fascinating, especially the up-close footage of bees in flight.  The kids didn’t like it so much when it started talking about the dangers bees face from weather and predators.  They didn’t like to watch bees getting killed, so we stopped watching it part way through.

 

City of the Bees by Moody Science was another fascinating movie.  Though it is a bit “old-fashioned” in its style of narration, it was cool to watch how they did experiments to find out how bees find food sources and how they tell their friends where to find it.  The kids did enjoy this one.

 

 

We watched a number of good YouTube videos, including ones about the bee life cycle, how to start a hive, how to collect honey, and how to manage the hives.  One of the most interesting things I observed in these videos was that many of the beekeepers were just dressed in regular clothes – no protective beekeeping gear (i.e. the white suit, hat with a net, gloves, etc.)

Also, for fun, and a bit of musical appreciation, a boy playing "Flight of the Bumblebee".

 

REAL-LIFE OBSERVATIONS

We have been able to make real-life observations of honeybees at work.  They love the dwarf bottlebrush plants we have in our front flower beds.  They also found the flowering broccoli plants in my garden in the backyard.  After reading about how they stuff pollen into the “pollen baskets” on their back legs, it was really neat to actually see them do it!

Travis took these pictures (actually, I extracted them from a video he took of them).

FIELD TRIP

I tried to find a local beekeeper who could give us a tour of his hives.  No luck yet, but we will keep looking …

We did make a “mini” field trip to a local bee stand that sells honey.  I was kind of disappointed that this guy isn’t the actual beekeeper himself, but just sells the honey someone else collects.  But it was fun anyway… and his honey is better than any I’ve had so far.

 

I’ve never been a big fan of the honey taste; I don’t mind it in baked goods, but not so much when I can taste it.  But I liked the smell of this stuff so much, I actually tried adding some to my oatmeal one morning.  Not bad! (That’s Canadian for “pretty good”.)

 SUMMARIZING WHAT WE LEARNED

To help summarize what we’ve learned, and to give the kids an opportunity for “show and tell”, we created a display board from a tri-fold cardboard display from Office Depot.

Since this was our first time to put together a display like this, I picked out what we would put on it and where and assigned each child a section or sections to do.  As we do more of these, I will encourage them to exercise their own creativity and give them practice in deciding what information is important to include.

Here’s the finished product…

Travis and Jeffrey colored the “Bees” title.

Heather and Travis filled in the “Facts About Bees” Worksheet.

 

• Bees live in a hive
• There are 3 types of bees in a hive: 1. queen 2. worker 3. drone
• A group of bees is called a colony
• The drones are male
• The workers are female
• There can be 60,000 bees in a colony.
• Bees are useful because they make honey and they pollinate flowers.
• Worker bees do lots of jobs:

1. Clean
2. Nurse
3. Make Wax
4. Guard
5. Forage

Travis drew this picture of an ideal bee yard: dappled sunlight, a hedge to protect from wind (the arrow), close to flowers and water.

 

Heather cut out and put together the bee life cycle:

 

Travis labeled the bee anatomy chart:

 

Travis and Heather each picked one of the 60 verses in the Bible that talk about bees or honey to write on their bee stationery:

 

Heather and Travis each did a different word search puzzle:

 

Jeffrey did a GREAT job on his color-by-number picture!

 

And Brian did an excellent job on tracing the bee to its hive:

 

And after reading about how good bees are for gardens and seeing how much they like the bottle brush plants, we decided to put a bottle brush near the newly planted spring/summer garden to see if they will come help our garden this year.