“Hilloway, holloway, willowy wee, let’s make the teacher a honeybee!”
Four Winds Nature Program students at Barstow Memorial School in Chittenden, VT recently explored honeybees and other pollinators. They learned about honeybee anatomy by dressing up their teachers – complete with a head, fuzzy thorax, and abdomen; four wings; two antenna; six legs with pollen baskets, pollen combs, and brushes; compound eyes for excellent flower-spying and simple eyes for seeing in the dark hive; a long proboscis for sipping nectar; a honey stomach to carry nectar back to the hive; wax glands; and a stinger.
Students practiced being pollinators by using cotton swabs to gently gather and transfer pollen among dandelions, some wondering if they brought pollen from one species of flower to another, would they create fun new hybrids to find next year?
Students had the most fun practicing the “waggle dance” used in honeybee hives to communicate the location of distant flowers. They took turns gathering “flowers” of different colors and bringing them back to their “hive” then letting their fellow foraging “bees” know how far away and in what direction the flower patches were located. Many agreed with Nellie-Bee from the puppet show, exclaiming, “Being a bee is hard work! We just want to eat honey!”
Upon watching a bumblebee buzzing among the dandelions, the students discussed our very important native pollinators. “I understand how honeybees fly”, said one student, “but how do big ol’ bumbles do that?!”
Honeybees (an introduced species brought to North America by settlers from Europe in the 1600’s for honey and to pollinate crops) are just one of many pollinators. Keep an eye out for some of the around 400 native bee species in the Northeast!
