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The Buzz on our Bee Discussions

We have all fallen in love with mason bees and the children can tell you lots of interesting facts about them. We will paint our houses next week and get ready to put them at the farm. Needless to say, excitement is high.

In the meantime, we are now learning about honey bees. The children are fascinated with bees and are deeply intrigued by these intelligent and well developed insects. We discussed their complex society, the job of each bee, what they eat, honey, royal jelly, life cycle and of course, the stings that are often associated with bees.

On Monday, we decided that we would play a bee game on Wednesday whereby we could take on the roles of all the bees in a hive. Of course, every girl said they wanted to be the queen so we decided that we would have a meeting to discuss rules and role assignments.

Today, as soon as we opened up the discussion Chloe said she wanted to be the queen bee and Alexa then added that she also wanted to be the queen. Chloe responded with "I have an idea. We can all be the queen bee and have different hives."

The discussion continued on like this:

Chloe: I will talk about the rules first. Put up your hand if you want to be a queen? OK, each one of us can be queen. I will be queen of the first hive.

I said: If all the girls are queens in different hives, I think we may have a problem in our hives.

Zev: But there are lots of queen bees, we need drones and worker bees too (we spent lots of time going over these terms so I am glad he remembered the terminology).
I said: Yes, if all the girls are queens we have no females to be the workers.
Zev: Maybe our teachers can be the workers.
Nico: We can make some boys as drones.
Loreli: Maybe we can share, we can take turns being queen bee.
Chloe: I don't like that idea I have the bestest idea- we can pretend to be queen in our own hive and pretend we have worker bees too. Everybody agree?

Everyone did agree so we all spread out around the room and pretend to have workers, drones flew in and out of our hives and all was well. Then we proclaimed Yvette to play the role of the queen and we divided ourselves into drones and workers and buzzed around the room, collecting pollen, going in and out of the hive, cleaning the hive and doing all the things bees do- it was exhausting being a bee!

I love the children's interest in these insects. The questions keep emerging, the understanding deepening and a respect for these creatures is developing. If we explore animals, nature and landscape with our children they will grow to love and respect the world around them. It is all about making connections.

Emily

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