Pollinating Bees

• paper bee (you can draw one or print one from the internet)

• popsicle stick

• clear tape

• small dishes (3 or 4)

• drink crystals, sugar, quinoa

The first thing you need to do is make or find a bee.

Once you have bee, you will need to glue it to a popsicle stick.

Strips of clear plastic tape were placed on the back off the bees’ wings and body. While pollen might have stuck to the bee without it, it made it easier to collect. By using clear tape for this experiment it was really easy to see the pollen.

Now it was time to set up the flowers and the pollen. We used flower muffin cups with lime gelatin crystals in them.

We found that as the bee moved from one flower to the next some of the pollen fell off. I was really glad we had placed a plastic mat under the silicone flowers. We would have had pollen everywhere without it.

As we experimented, we talked about what was happening. We concluded that it is totally not a surprise that pollen gets dropped into neighboring flowers. This is how new flowers grow. We had pollen on the bee, on the plastic mat and in the neighboring flower. We talked about how some of that pollen ends up in air. It is that pollen that can cause kids with allergies to sneeze and have watery eyes.