Bees and Pollinators

Bees, Bee, Oh so important, Bees!

Learning about bees and pollination

Our lesson this week is focused, as spring is nearly here and the flowers are starting to pop up out of the warming ground, on honey bees and pollination.

Our words of the week this week are:  POLLINATION and PROBOSCIS.

We talked about what plants need to grow:  sunshine, water, healthy soil and air, space AND some flowering plants *need* POLLINATORS.  

Pollinators perform the important job of POLLINATION:  the moving of pollen from the boy (anther) part of the flower to the girl (stigma) part of the flower so they can create seeds and reproduce (make more plants)!  

The flower gives the bees something so essential:  food.  They drink the nectar of the flower, a sugary watery substance, and eat some pollen - both of which they also use to make honey.

  They use their straw-like tongue called a PROBOSCIS to drink the nectar.  

While they are eating nectar and pollen, some of the pollen gets stuck on the bee's body and legs.  When they moving from flower to flower, the pollen drops into the other flowers, pollinating the flower, allowing them to produce seeds and thus, reproduce!  

Both flower and bee benefit one another.

The kids got to pretend to be bees and move pollen from flower to flower and drink nectar like a bee.

(I didn't get pictures of the older children this week.)

We learned about the lifecycle of a bee from egg to larva to pupa to adult bee.

We learned about the queen bee, the worker bees (girls), drones (boy bees), and the many jobs the bees have to make their hive a successful home.  We learned how they make nectar and pollen into honey and that they are the only insects that make food that humans eat.

And we learned that if we didn't have bees, we might not have some of our favorite foods:

We learned the importance of supporting our local beekeepers and growing gardens in our yards that bees and butterflies like.  

Here are some of the books we enjoyed this week:

During our bee lesson this week, we think a leprechaun visited our rooms!  The kids were extremely excited and happy to follow the trail of gold.