Summer Camp - Bees

Circle Time - We talked about the body parts of a bee and compared them to spiders to see what is different.  We discovered that bees are hairy too!  The kiddos each drew a bee on their white board.  They were so cute, I wish I had had them draw their bee on paper.   Here are a few bees from my older group.  We worked on getting the 3 body parts, 6 legs, 2 wings, 2 large eyes and the hair.  They did great!

Now for some Bee Science - First we learned about how bees collect pollen.  They roll around on the flowers and it gets all stuck in their "fur".  Then they carefully comb their "fur" with their legs and gather all the pollen on their back legs and pack it into stiff hairs call pollen baskets.  That's how they take it back to the hive.

We decided to give this a try.  We got flowers (cupcake wrappers) with lots of pollen in them (crushed graham crackers) and we got a big fat bee (marshmallow) and rolled our bee around in the pollen (after licking it, because sadly, our marshmallow bees don't have any hair) and then we ate them!  Yummers!

With my older kiddos we tried a second pollen experiment.  We used Cheetos! They already stick so well to our fingers, we figured that was similar to bees and pollen too!  It worked really well, we wiped our Cheeto fingers on a cotton ball (bee).

For our next experiment we learned about bee's tongues.  They aren't like ours.  They are more like a straw and they are called a proboscis.  So we tried out having a proboscis (straw) for a  mouth...

Once we had that down, we tried using a proboscis to get some nectar...

We also talked about how bees make honey.  They collect the nectar from the flowers and swallow it to a honey stomach.  When they return to the hive they spit up the nectar onto the mouth parts of a worker bee.  The bee then rolls the nectar around on its proboscis to evaporate some of the water.  Next he places it in a cell of the comb and stirs it with his proboscis and fans it.  Once all the extra water has evaporated, they cap the cell off with wax.  Taadaa!  Honey!  For snack I made homemade biscuits to smear honey on.  (See recipe in previous post.)

Backyard bug hunt - The kiddos enjoyed hunting for bugs again today.  The weather was warmer, so we found some!  The kiddos also created habitats for their captured bugs (we did release them at the end of camp today.)

Here is a little daddy long leg...

 Here is an ant ...

 Here is a rolly-polly...

 
Yarn Webs -  A couple of the kiddos enjoyed making yarn webs again.  They tied up the swing set pretty well...