We had an email from @louisebrown asking us where bees go in the winter so we decided to learn all about bees.
We like to make things so the first thing we did was make a little bee of our own.
A fuzzy bee.
Next we started finding out about bees by looking in books and on the internet.
A book about bees.
We also found a lovely film about a beekeeper.
We learned that bees only fly around if it’s warmer than 10 degrees. If it gets colder they huddle together in their hive or nest and try to keep the queen bee warm. The workers all shudder and tremble to make her warm and they take it in turns to be on the outside so no bee gets too cold (a bit like penguins!).
We love honey so we wanted to learn a bit more about how it’s made. Bees make honey in their hives. The honeycomb they make has a really good pattern, which is made up of hexagons (six-sided shapes). We made a honeycomb pattern.
Putting together hexagons to make a honeycomb pattern.
Putting together shapes like this is called tessellation. Honeycomb is a great example of tessellation.
Once we’d made our honeycomb pattern we drew some bees on it. They’re going back to the beehive to keep warm until the weather gets better.
Bees going back to their hive.
6 Comments
I enjoyed reading about your bee project and pleased to see that it had been prompted by Louise Brown (who is another person I like).
The bee that you made is delightful, and made me smile.
I get a lot of different bees in my garden because there are a lot of the types of flowers that bees like best (my garden is rather wild). Sometimes I try to identify the bumble bees using the chart from this website: http://www.bumblebeeconservation.org.uk/bumblebees_id.htm
Olive says: Thank you for liking our bee. Thank you for the chart with the pictures of the bees.
Frieda says: I’m happy that you enjoyed our little project because we’ve been working on bees and we know now what they do in the winter.
Wow girls, what a fabulous project on bees. I had no idea they all huddled together to keep the queen warm so I’ve learnt something new too. And thanks to Janet for posting the bee identification guide. I’ve just used it to find out that we have red-tailed bumble bees living in our garden. If I manage to capture a film of them then I’ll make sure to share it with you.
Frieda says: Thank you for helping us learn about bees because we really enjoyed it. I would like to see your film if you get one.
Olive says: Thank you for letting us do about bees. We’ve found lots of bees in our garden already.
What a great project. Megan is learning a lot about bees because we have a hive. But at the moment they have a disease, where lots of little mites called varroa are infecting them. Today, Megan’s dad put on his big white bee suit and opened the hive. He set light to his smoker so the bees would go dozy. (The smoke makes them a bit scared that there’s a fire so they eat lots of honey, then they go a bit sleepy like when you’ve had a big lunch.) Then he had to pop lots of eggs of the drone bees to kill them because that’s where the varroa grow.
Frieda says: I like the sound of the dad taking the bee hive apart, because it sounds exciting. The disease sounds like when you have got a bad, bad cold.
Olive says: The dad using the smoker sounds really exciting. I would like to see inside a bee hive too. I’m sorry the bees aren’t well.
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[...] in touch with Paul Webster after we stopped working on the same project together, I’ve helped two little girls to find out about bees and I’ve tweeted along to many episodes of Question Time, Match of the Day and The [...]