Student Bee Work!!

Ms. Wagner & Ms. Kennedy's 1st Grade classroom has been hard at work exploring the wonderful world of honeybees. They made an excellent model of the structure bees build to live in and store honey, called comb. Their comb had bees of different life stages and included worker bees performing various tasks. Like good scientists they had a key explaining everything! It is wonderful to see the connection between the beehives and students at Lab. Here are some pictures of their model comb.

 An overview of the entire project. 

 They even have queen cells (larger cells hanging off the bottom)!

 The excellent key to the labels.

The queen's mating flight!

 Flowers for workers to forage at.

 The whole set up.

Various stages of larval development!

Blue Bees!

People are always asking if the bees they see belong to the Lab apiary. Now we have a chance to answer that question because this week a group of students took on the task of labeling some of our bees.

Approximately 2,500 bees were removed from one of the hives and chilled in the freezer until they became immobile. The students then quickly gave each bee a small dot of blue paint on the thorax. The bees slowly warmed up and were returned to the apiary.

The paint should last for about two weeks - so keep an eye out for our bees as you pass gardens and flowers in Hyde Park. In order to gather some data on how far from the hive the bees forage it would be great to hear about locations where people see them - we'll take the exactness of GPS or just what building or address the bees are near.

Don't forget to say hello to the blue bees!!!

Thanks to the bee labelers - Francine, Clay, Jason, Whitney, Daniel, Justin, Tom, Cat, Mr. Jones, Alex and Chevonne.

ESH 1st graders visit the apiary!

Today, two classrooms from ESH - Ms. Wagner & Ms. Kennedy and Ms. Rochester & Ms. Cincotta - visited the apiary. Ms. Wagner's class has been making an awesome bee display outside their classroom and Ms. Rochester's class has been studying insects. This makes the apiary and the garden a perfect to visit and make connections to the classroom.

It was a beautiful sunny day with blooming plants and active bees!!





The students gathered around the apiary and talked about how to behave around the bees and  used their observation skills to view the bees and the beehives.








 

The students were even able to see pollen on the back legs of bees returning to the hive.

 We also put some bees in a box so the students could observe them up close.

They students brought with them some great questions about the bees. Here are a couple of them:

We opened the hive and took out a frame of honeycomb covered with bees. The students formed a receiving line and were excited to see so many bees up close!

Then we put the frame back and the students returned to school with visions of happy bees!!

Thanks for the visit!!

And don't forget the famous monarch butterfly! The students saw some of the telltale larvae on milkweed plants!! Bonus!