Mind Your Beeswax.

This week we've been learning all about the bee. There's a lot of interest in bees at the moment because the planet needs them and they're disappearing. Even the man who works in the honey aisle in Tesco was telling us that in China they were fertilising flowers by hand as there weren't enough bees. So, Project Bee was launched.

First up we had  bit of reading time with  The Beeman. It's the story of a boy whose grandfather keeps bees, earning him the name 'The Beeman'. There's lots of reasons to love this book: it features grandparents; it could feature a white family, but it doesn't; it has a nice cumulative narrative like 'This is the Train to Glasgow' (or This is the House that Jack Built). It has beautiful illustrations and is packed with information about bees; it even has the recipe for grandma's muffins for you to try at home. There are many directions you could take with this book but we're sticking with the bees for now!

Abigail was interested in the life cycle of the bee and the different roles that bees have in the hive. There are also notes on beekeeping and bee behaviour which we'll go back to later. I had a look on Ted Ed for videos about bees and picked out this one, which explains why bees use hexagons in their honeycombs.

We finished off for the day by having honey sandwiches (of course), but there's so much more to explore on this subject. Colony collapse disorder, building a bee bath and baking those muffins are all on our to-do list!