The Business of Bees
Objectives
Students will know there are different kinds of honey bees and will describe some of the jobs honey bees have.
Students will use their senses to imitate a bee’s duties.
Students will develop a simple model that mimics the function of an animal in pollinating plants.
Background
The honeybee, like all other insects has a body that is divided into three sections: the head, the thorax, and the abdomen. The honeybee also has three pair of legs, two pair of wings, two feelers, two eyes, a tongue and a stinger. The bee’s body is thickly covered with fine hairs. When a bee travels from flower to flower, grains of pollen stick to these hairs.
Bees have many duties. The majority of bees in a hive are worker bees. Worker bees clean the hive, tend to and feed young bees, make royal jelly and beebread to feed larva, produce wax, cool the hive by fanning their wings, as well as gather and store pollen. They also collect nectar and water, guard the hive and feed and care for the drone bees and the queen bee. Some worker bees are house bees and take care of the duties inside the hive. Others are field bees who collect nectar and bring it back to the house bees. Field bees forage for food gathering pollen and nectar from as many as 10,000 flowers a day.
The above video is wonderful for background information, but the language may be advanced for younger students. Best for a secondary audience.
Guard bees protect the hive. They smell the scent of bees coming to the hive. If the bee has a scent that is different from the guard bee’s hive, it will be attacked and chased away. Only honeybees with the familiar scent will be allowed in the hive to do their duties. Drone bees are the male members of the colony. They are a little larger and make up only about five percent of the hive population. Drones are fed royal jelly. They have huge compound eyes that meet at the top of their head and they have wider bodies with rounded abdomens. Drones, like all other male bees and wasps, do not have stingers. Drones mate with the queen bee and after mating, they die.
Queen, drone, and worker bees
Each hive has one queen bee. She is slightly larger than a worker bee. Queen bee larvae are fed only royal jelly. The adult queen’s sole duty is to lay eggs, up to 2,000 a day. She is fed by the workers and never leaves the hive except to mate. Once she has mated, she heads back to the hive to start laying eggs in beeswax chambers created by the workers. A queen maintains the sperm she has collected for her lifetime in a special pouch in her body and can lay eggs indefinitely. The fertilized eggs laid by a queen become female worker bees and new queens. She also lays some unfertilized eggs, which produce the drones. A queen bee usually lives about a year and a half, although some survive up to six years. If a queen dies prematurely and the colony has no new queen to replace her, the colony will die. When the colony gets too large, an additional queen may emerge, and some of the bees swarm off to form a new colony with the new queen.
Helpful Resources
Jobs of a Honey Bee Infographic - Beekeeping Basics
STEAM Connections & Kentucky Academic Standards
NGSS
Life Science: Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems, Structure and Function, Life Cycles - K-LS1-1, K-ESS2-2, K-ESS3-1, K-ESS3-3, 1-LS1-1, 1-LS1-2, 1-LS3-1, 2-LS2-2, 2-LS4-1, 3-LS1-1, 3-LS2-1, 3-LS4-2, 3-LS4-3, 3-LS4-4, 4-LS1-1, 4-LS1-2, 5-PS3-1, 5-LS2-1
Developing and Using Models
Cause and Effect
Math
Measurement and Data
Numbers and Operations
Art
Drama
ELA
Write an Opinion Piece
Suggested Books:
Honey in a Hive, by Anne Rockwell
Flight of the Honey Bee By Rebecca Olien
The Honeybee Man By Lela Nargi
What If There Were No Bees? By Suzanne Slade
Introduction
Read the book, Honey in a Hive, by Anne Rockwell and discuss the different duties of the bees in the book.
Activity 1—Busy, Busy Bee
This activity will help students understand how hard bees work to gather food.
Estimated Time: 30 minutes
Materials:
Artificial flowers
Yellow craft pom poms
Basket for the beehive
Honey with honeycomb
Procedures:
Before class, hide artificial flowers around the room
Place yellow pom poms beside the flowers to represent nectar and pollen.
Put an empty basket in the center of the room to represent the beehive.
Explain that worker bees search for pollen and nectar and then bring it back to the hive where it is stored.
Children search for pollen and nectar and bring it back to the hive. They continue searching for pollen and nectar until all the pom poms are collected.
Students observe how much pollen and nectar is in the basket and discuss what it would be like to spend the entire day finding and carrying pollen and nectar.
Explain that lots of bees work together to feed the hive. FYI: In her entire life, a honeybee collects only enough nectar to create about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey.
Make sure there are no students with honey allergies in your class.
Take the honeycomb out of the jar and place it on a sieve or screen to allow the honey to drip through onto a plate.
Let children touch the honeycomb – if there is enough, break off little pieces and let them touch, smell, observe, and taste it.
Give each child a small piece of bread or a cracker with a little honey to celebrate the gift of honey bees!
Follow up and assessment: In their science journals, have students draw a picture showing what they know about bees from today’s lesson.
Activity 2—Guard Bees
Estimated Time: 20 minutes
Materials:
Scented cotton balls
Essential oils
Small containers
Procedures:
Drop liquid scent (peppermint, vanilla, lemon, ect.) on cotton balls. I put the cotton balls in small plastic containers—this makes it easy for children to carry them around and also to keep from putting it too close to their nose. Some children are very sensitive to scents.
Give one cotton ball container to each “honeybee” that is a field worker bee.
Also give the one scent to each guard bee. There should be only one guard bee per scent.
Have the worker bees pretend to visit flowers (you may use the flowers from Activity 1 or have students make flowers as an art extension).
Worker bees return to the hive, but before they can enter, the guard bee smells the scent container to see if the worker bee is from that hive. If the scent is the same, the worker bee is invited into the hive. If the scent is different, the guard bee will send the honeybees away to search for their own hive.
Curriculum Connections
How Bees Communicate
Every wonder how bees talk with one another? They do it through a specialized “waggle” dance that provides the other bees in the hive information about what, where, and how far food can be found. Try these lessons that teach how bees communicate:
Buzzy, Buzzy Bee
This intermediate lesson from Food, Land and People provides an activity that models honey bee pollination in an apple orchard.
Technology and Social Studies
Students work individually or in small groups to research the role bees and honey have played in different cultures and how it has medicinal properties dating back to medieval times.
Language & Visual Arts
Read the book What If There Were No Bees? By Suzanne Slade. Students can then create cards, posters, banners and so on to get the message out about how important bees are and what they do for humans.
We also have several printable graphics about bee life cycles, bee anatomy, and ways to improve bee and pollinator habitats.
In the Garden
Feed the Bees - One of the reasons bees are disappearing is that they do not have a regular food source due to loss of habitat, flowers that provide them nectar and pollen. We tend to call those flowers weeds. If you have space at your school or home, consider planting flowers that will feed the bees. A few favorite flowers are sunflowers, honeysuckle, lavender, verbena, clover, rosemary, cosmos, hollyhock, iris, sage, and thyme.
Honeybees and Water - Honey bees need a lot of water, especially in the summer. They use the water to cool inside the hive, to prevent the wax honeycomb from melting.
If you are a careful observer, you can see the tongue, called a proboscis, sucking up the water. A very shallow container of water can be placed near flowers or in a garden to give bees a cool drink. Remember to change the water daily to prevent bacteria from growing and to prevent mosquitoes from breeding.
The other pollinators, such as butterflies, will appreciate the water as well!