Set up a learning center area with picture books and magazines about these fascinating insects. Ranger Rick Magazine, Our Big Backyard, and other nature magazines provide excellent pictures.

Make a display of mounted bees, beehives, honeycombs, jars of honey, and wax products. Invite a beekeeper to visit your facility to tell the children how they raise bees. Perhaps the beekeeper could show a bee colony, protective clothing, honeycombs, and natural honey to the children.

Plan a field trip to a museum of natural history, if there’s one near you, to see insect collections and displays.

Check with the media center at your local library for filmstrips or films about bees.

Set up a listening center where the children may listen to recordings of insect sounds.

Take your children on a bee hunt to see busy bees at work. Quietly watch the bees feed on the sweet flower nectar of dandelions, clover, or other common wild flowers.

Remind your children that they need to be careful as they study bees. Insects and other living things should always be treated with care. Don't destroy their natural habitats.

Set up a learning center area, or other area, where the children may discover pollen.

Provide some fresh flowers, such as dandelions, tulips, crocuses, asters, or zinnias. Let the children try to pick up the pollen with their fingers, a brush, a cotton ball, and clear transparent tape. Have the children look at the pollen with a magnifying glass.

Set up a creative play area where the children may pretend to be beekeepers. Supply the area with gloves, hats, nettings, boxes for beehives, jars for honey, and cotton balls for bees.

There are over 10,000 species of bees, but only honeybees make honey and wax. Honey is the only food eaten by man that is produced by an insect.

Fruits and vegetables wouldn't exist if bees didn't help fertilize flowers.

Bees get nectar and pollen from flowers. The nectar is used to make honey. The honey and pollen are used as food for the bees.

Bees have a special stomach in which to carry the nectar from the flowers to their nests.

In the honeycomb, the water in the nectar evaporates, and the chemicals provided by the bee's stomach change the nectar into honey.

In the bee colony, there are three classes - (1) queen (lays the eggs); (2) workers (gather food and care for young); (3) drones (fertilize the queen).

A beehive is made up of honeycomb which contains many 6 sided cells. The eggs are laid in the center cells, pollen is stored in cells around the center cells, and nectar is stored in cells above the pollen.

A worker bee produces wax which oozes out of its pores. The bee picks it off its abdomen, chews it, and uses it to build the honeycomb.

A bee stings in self-defense, and usually only if bothered. A worker bee dies shortly after stinging, because it loses its stinger; a queen stings only to kill other queens; drones have no stingers.

Commercial beekeeping (called apiculture) started in the 1800's. Today beekeepers tend about 5 million hives, selling about 250 million pounds of honey each year.

Beekeepers keep from 40-75 hives in one location for a bee colony. A colony can gather 20-25 pounds of nectar in one day.

Beekeepers wear special clothing to protect themselves while handling bees.

Here is the beehive, where are the bees? (hold up fist with thumb enclosed in fist)

Hidden away where nobody sees. (place other hand over the hive)

Watch and you'll see them come out of the hive, (closely watch "hive")

One, two, three, four, five. (very slowly, beginning with the thumb, the fingers come out of the hive, one by one)