The Abundant Garden Sample

Memory verse: Proverbs 16:24, "Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.”

Bees are incredible little insects and are essential to life as we know it. Bees are responsible for pollinating a third of the food we eat! Because of this, they are an important factor to consider as you continue to plan your garden. Here are ten facts about bees taken from National Geographic Kids.

1. Honey bees are super-important pollinators for flowers, fruits and vegetables. This means that they help other plants grow! Bees transfer pollen between the male and female parts, allowing plants to grow seeds and fruit.

2. Honey bees live in hives (or colonies). The members of the hive are divided into three types:

• Queen: One queen runs the whole hive. Her job is to lay the eggs that will spawn the hive’s next generation of bees. The queen also produces chemicals that guide the behavior of the other bees.
• Workers: These are all female and their roles are to forage for food (pollen and nectar from flowers), build and protect the hive, clean and circulate air by beating their wings. Workers are the only bees most people ever see flying around outside the hive.
• Drones: These are the male bees, and their purpose is to mate with the new queen. Several hundred live in each hive during the spring and summer. But come winter, when the hive goes into survival mode, the drones are kicked out!

3.  What are these buzzing bugs most famous for? Delicious honey! But did you know they produce honey as food stores for the hive during winter? Luckily for us, these efficient little workers produce 2-3 times more honey than they need, so we get to enjoy the tasty treat, too!

4. If the queen bee dies, workers will create a new queen by selecting a young larva (the newly hatched baby insects) and feeding it a special food called 'royal jelly'. This enables the larva to develop into a fertile queen.

5. Honey bees are fab flyers. They fly at a speed of around 25 km per hour and beat their wings 200 times per second!

6. Each bee has 170 odorant receptors, which means they have one serious sense of smell! They use this to communicate within the hive and to recognize different types of flowers when looking for food.

7. The average worker bee lives for just five to six weeks. During this time, she’ll produce around a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.

8. The queen can live up to five years. She is busiest in the summer months, when she can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day!

9. Honey bees are also brilliant boogiers! To share information about the best food sources, they perform their ‘waggle dance’. When the worker returns to the hive, it moves in a figure-of-eight and waggles its body to indicate the direction of the food source. Cool, huh?

10. Sadly, over the past 15 years, colonies of bees have been disappearing, and the reason remains unknown. Referred to as 'colony collapse disorder', billions of honey bees across the world are leaving their hives, never to return. (https://www.natgeokids.com/uk/discover/animals/insects/honey-bees/)

Bees

The following video shows some incredible footage of bees that include more insights into the way they live. The video is produced by the makers of the Flow Hive and is not sponsored (they just happened to make great videos).

This next video shows the queen doing her job (laying eggs) in real time. The queen is the large one with the red dot painted on her.

One of the most amazing things about bees is how they are able to share complex navigation information with each other. The following video details what we've learned about this process.

Colony collapse disorder:

Our bee population has been under significant stress since the mid 1980's. Over the last ten years, bees have made headlines in the news as bee colonies have been dying off at a much higher rate than usual. This has been blamed on many things, but the most likely culprits are a combination of the following reasons:

• Lack of consistent food sources: Bees need plants that are flowering the entire warm season of the year to produce enough honey to survive. Farm land that is in monoculture (growing only one type of crop in field after field) doesn't have plants that are flowering at different times during the warm season. Also, with large scale agriculture, often every possible growing area is used, including unused land that had been previously left wild. These wild spaces once allowed a place where native flowers provided a food source for local bees.
• Pesticides: A new group of pesticides, called neonicotinoids, have been added in recent years to the pesticides already in use and have been blamed for colony collapse disorder. In fact, the European Union has banned many pesticides in that group since 2013. For more information, visit Pesticides and Pollinators.
• Parasites: In the 1980's, a mite called Varroa destructor,which literally sucks blood from bees, was accidentally introduced in the United States from Asia.  It significantly added to the stress of honey bee colonies.  Learn more at the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

There has been significant debate as to which of these factors is the main cause of the problem and there have been a number of other outlandish claims in the media. The following video gives a brief summary of some of the information and misinformation that has been presented.

Beekeeping:

Beekeeping

Since the news of colony collapse disorder spread, there has been a significant increase in back yard beekeeping by people who are concerned about the bee population. Many have found this to be a very enjoyable hobby which can be practiced even in some cities (make sure to check your local city codes). The following series of videos was again put together by Flow Hive.

Collecting Honey:

Honey has been taken from bees for thousands of years in a variety of ways. The following three videos show ways this is done from ancient, to modern, to brand new.

This next video shows how honey is traditionally collected in the wild in India.

This video shows the modern, largely mechanized extraction of honey.

This video is the promotional video for the Flow Hive. Please note it does have an evolution reference at the beginning of the video. It shows a simpler way to collect the sweet reward of keeping bees.

We hope you had fun learning about bees. Check out the book recommendations and activities to learn even more! Have fun gardening!

->Browse the great literature that goes with this lesson->

Sample Week Table of Contents

Bees

• Bee Lesson
• Bee Literature
• Honey Butter
• Honey Lemon Lollipops
• Beeswax Candles
• You Are So Bee.you.tiful Cards
• Anatomy of a Bee
• Become a Bee Guardian

Next week's lesson "Johnny Appleseed"