The Life of Bees

A few weeks ago I borrowed City of Bees from the library. This DVD peaked both my and L's interest and I decided to do some research and put together some activities.
I found a lot of great resources here and one of them was a template to make your own bee. I cut all of the pieces out of construction paper and used wax paper for the wings. I really helped L with her bee because I wanted the end product to be realistic for further use.

We talked about the different parts of a bee and counted how many wings, legs, eyes etc. they have. Did you know a bumble bee has five eyes! I used some hexagon pieces from our Settlers game to create a small piece of the hive for the bees to fly into and do their various work.

We of course also talked about how bees make honey and then had to sample some for our snack.

I saw this counting game on Chasing Cheerios a while ago and adapted it for bees. Each bee has it's own number and each time you roll the number the bee moves closer to her flower to get the nectar.

The other day L was playing in the back yard and came to the door with something in her hand to show me. She was so excited "Look Mommy a bee!!" I tried not to freak out and quickly realised it was no longer alive. Phew. Then I got excited myself and pulled out the magnifying glass and all of our bee materials. We had a blast examining a real bee and comparing it to our diagrams and pictures.

Some other things we've done are to talk about the different types of flowers bees like and watch them pollinate and get nectar from them. We also drew pictures using the diagram as a guide to know how many parts to put on them.

This has been a real learning experience for me as well as L. I realised how little I knew about bees! We are planning to do some more bee activities in the next little while before we move onto something else.

Here are some of the books we've been reading:

Bumble Bees by Cheryl Coughlan

World of Insects Bumblebees by Emily K. Green

Honey Bees by Deborah Heiligman