Honey Bees
Page Contents
22 April Lesson Plan 2022.pdf24 April Field Card 2022.pdfThinking/Science Routines
Don’t forget to remind and reinforce students to use science routines and thinking tools, building and growing their scientific thinking toolkits all year.
This lesson is one giant role-playing (and empathy-building) game, but they can still be reminded of science practices during the game explanation, role descriptions, and debriefing between rounds. You can ask what they noticed about the life in the hive, what they are curious about honeybees, and what honeybee "society" reminds them of. Help them make connections to the importance of pollinators (not just honeybees) and how WE are connected to them as well as how they are vital for the ecosystems of Earth.
Honey Bee Background Information
Waggle Dance - CLASSROOM TEACHERS: please show to class before the field lesson
How Honey is Made
Interesting article on the Waggle Dance here: Unlocking secrets of the honeybee dance language – bees learn and culturally transmit their communication skills
Honey Bee Natural History - click the links to watch on YouTube
Honey Bee Non-Fiction Piece for Classroom
Honey bee colorful non-fiction.pdfHoney Bee Background Info from Hands-On Nature
Honeybee background info.pdfBackground From: https://cals.arizona.edu/pubs/insects/ahb/
Honey Bee Dances-infosheet.pdfDance Language and Orientation of Bees-excerpt.pdfHoney Bee Field Lesson
Field Lesson Plan
19 March Lesson Plan 2022.pdfField Card (summary)
20.5 March Field Card 2022.pdfStudent Journal Page
March Journal Page.pdfOld Beehive Role Cards for game
Bee Hive Simulation roles-2018.pdfNew role cards 2021
Honeybee Role Cards for Charades and Game 2021-v2.pdfLesson Updates 2021
New Role Cards (laminated, color, 5x7 cards with more scientific information and no directions for game - kids can make up their own actions, for example, they carry the cards with them. In the first game this year, the guard bees asked to see their cards as ID before letting them in the hive! In 2022, bees passed the flowers (representing pollen) to each new be in turn as they processed it into honey - from the forager to the house bee/chef to the nurse bees, etc (both classes came up with those variations themselves! Fewer specific directions leads to great innovations!)
Reverse Charades to introduce Roles - an instructor can pick a card without looking, hold it up where they can't see the front (on your forehead like in party games works well) and ALL the students act out the role and the docent has to guess.
Fewer props - we kept the antennae, crown, and feather dusters, but no food (kids are perfectly fine pretending to feed other bees) and we left off the honey and graham crackers this year - turns out we don't need that either - kids love playing the game, so giving more time for that is perfect.
Large "placeholder" signs for Queen, Larvae, and Drone because of some small class sizes - can use these instead of students playing these more passive roles, and it also helped with social distancing so they weren't cleaning and feeding other kids.
Waggle Dance: Everyone does the waggle dance together and plays a round of searching for flowers before the full simulation game
Native Bees
Share photos with students if time during discussion on importance of pollinators
19.5 Native Bees.pdfVisual Gallery Bees of the Eastern Sierra1.pdfClassroom Activities - just for fun!
From: https://www.thoughtco.com/free-bees-printables-1832364 and https://cals.arizona.edu/pubs/insects/ahb/
Digging Deeper
More background information on bees for your interest and education!
(AKA, Let's obsess about bees!!)
Longer Video: Tales from the Hive - Nova
(Recommend starting at 1:41 if showing to students - preview beginning to see why and use your judgement about your class's maturity level!)
TED Talk on bees for background
(Shorter than the NOVA video, and with information on bees' importance to human food supply, and research on how to save them (and us))
The Amazing Hexagonal Honeycomb - a Natural Tessellation
Recent Research
Well, actually, it doesn't appear to be accurate that the bees build hexagons - at least they don't seem to be actually calculating and building the 120 ° angled sides from the start.
Recent research has found that they actually start out with cylinders - much simpler to build, BUT, by some method, not yet agreed upon and still a subject of ongoing research, bees do end up constructing honeycombs that are made from a wonderful tessellation of hexagonal prismatic structures.
POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS of constructing the hexagonal honeycomb from cylinders include:
The wax naturally forms into hexagonal shapes from the normal heat in the hives and the pressures from the closely packed structure.
Their behavior in actively shaping and trimming the cylinders physically after construction to make them most efficient. - Hexagonal comb cells of honeybees are not produced via a liquid equilibrium process (2012)
Their behavior is actively heating the wax so it begins to flow to form into hexagons naturally (from the way the cylinders are packed together, or possibly they only heat the corners). - Honeybee combs: how the circular cells transform into rounded hexagons (2013)
Their behavior in how they start construction of the cylinders (always starting the next one in the joint between two previous ones). - The hexagonal shape of the honeycomb cells depends on the construction behavior of bees (2016)
Remember:
Always BEE Kind, Always BEE Learning, and Always BEE the Best you can BEE!
:-D
