Feild Trip: Mason Bees

Cocoa Green Market

Sept 27th 2013

 

We started off with a short educational video of different types of insects that help our gardens and wild plants.

The kids learned mainly about Bees and how they gather Pollen from plant to plant.  Kids also learned some main identifying traits of bees, butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, stink bugs etc.

 

 

 

Next we went outside to explore the garden looking at all the different types of bugs in the garden.

 

While outside the kids and adults got to learn about native Florida plants and how to keep our Gardens full of life (Bug life).  As the kids found Insects our guide would come and collect it into a collector so the kids could see the insect up close but the insect was safe. Insect is only inspected for a minute or two and placed back where they were. 

 Found some caterpillars and a few cystitis, stink bugs, bees of different types, lady bugs to name a few.

After the garden we were shown a Mason Bee house and told how to build one.  Now we are in the search of a nice piece of wood to build a house with to put into our garden.

The neat thing is each hole can can fit at least 5 baby bees.  As the babies are ready they come out 1 at a time with the front being the first out (last one in) male bee.  The first egg laid will be the last bee out and the bee will the a SHE.

Did you know that 55% of all insects are female??  So next time your calling a bug a gender say SHE, your more likely to be right.

 

We ended our trip with exploring the farm and looking at the cows, goats, European Honey Bee hive, lots of Chickens  and some fresh Pumpkin Ice cream.

If your in the area this is a great farm to visit and try some yummy treats in the store

Our Bee unit

Honey Bee Unit

This unit was awesome.  K learned a lot about honey bees. The best of all he now understands why Honey bees are great for the earth.  Each day we spent 20 Min's learning about honey bee's and some type of craft or writing work. 

Crafts that we made.

We made the honey been to put up on the spring bulletin board.  Don't you just love this little bee character that K made.

We were studying the body parts of the honey bee and what better way to learn about how bees use their antennas than to make a hate with some on top.  K loved walking about buzzing and smelling things with his antennas.

                                                                 Busy Bee
we watched a short video of honey bees and their hive on this site and than we had a tasting of honey.  K had honey before but it's like it all clicked where honey was from after this weeks unit.

A little writing lesson I put together.  Working on free writing skills.  This [project had little help.  I just encouraged for K to use his own thoughts and to go with it.  He wanted me to help him with a few words but this was for his learning to listen for the letters and to think about what he was writing.  Just priceless writing from my 1st grader.  His honey comb rooms had a bathroom and my computer and toys but he just wouldn't write it all as he told me.

The Books we used

Honey Bees

                                                                    bees!

We also read The Amazing Honey Bee book from the $1.00 area at Target but didn't get a photo of the book.

we also snacked on honey comb cereal as we studied Honey Bees