Bee-ology & Flower Art!

For science this week I found an amazing bee kit on Amazon. I wasn’t sure how I’d like it at first, the description wasn’t great on the Amazon page, but bee kits are not an easy find. I’m very happy to say I was incredibly impressed with this kit, and the price tag was great as well. Only $9.99 and for everything that comes in the kit it is definitely worth the buy and now one of my top recommended kits on Amazon! Check out all of the details below and the link to buy your own!

We also used our microscope (the link to buy the one we use is below) to view the premade honey bee slides we got on Amazon. We got to look at bee legs, antenna and wings up close and took notes on our observations!

The kit comes with 6 activities and includes everything you need aside from the fresh flowers.

1 – The first is about pollination that lets the kids put on a little bee finger figure and pollinate a live flower! Flower not included naturally since you need it to be live. The instructions gives clear details of the parts of plants that need to be pollinated and what happens when they are. This is the quickest activity in the kit.

2 – The Bee Dance. In this activity the booklet explains how bees communicate with dace and even gives some examples of a couple of dances and what they mean! Then your child can use the magnetic wand to make their bees dance. The only thing I didn’t like about this one is the paperclip doesn’t cover all of the sticky strip on the back so unless you cover it they will get pretty gross over time. I used a bit of hot glue to seal ours, it also helped the clips stay on much better. This is a pretty quick one to do as well.

3 – In this project kids will make their own bee buzzer that creates the buzzing sound when spun just like a bee and teaches how bigger bee’s have slower wing beats etc. Make sure you have a strong stapler to punch threw the wood or you could always tape or glue the string on as well. The kit comes with a brown stick but we used a yellow one we already had to look more bee like.

4 – With this activity kids can look through a bee mask to see how they see and the booklet explains how the bees five eyes work. I didn’t like that the mask has to be held. I know it’s not meant to be worn as a dress up thing or for any length of time, but even using it for a few min to look around like a bee holding it can be annoying for small children. Also the kid loved it so much, of course it was going to be wore for more than a moment but there’s no string or strap to hold it on. But, as always, mom fixed that with her trusty hot glue gun easily!

5 – This is definitely the coolest activity. The kit comes with an oversized bee model that can be split open to reveal the organs of a honey bee. The booklet does a great job explaining what each part is and what it does and how to put it all back together properly. We turned it into a little fake direction event with one of the kiddos play knife and tongs. It was a big hit with the kid. The booklet photos are not the same color as the organs, but personally I liked that because it forced the kid to pay attention to what each thing looked like rather than just matching colors. Any time we do the anatomy of something we also compare it to human anatomy using our magnetic dolls and books. Link to buy those are also below.

6 – Bee Colony. We are saving this one for next weekend when we dive more into how the hive works. The activity lets kids put together the inside of a hive to make a whole colony. Everything is made form vinyl clings that can be reused and moved around or the vinyl hive cling could be put on a window as a sun catcher! Your kids get to place different hive cells of larva, eggs, different pupas, pollen, uncapped and capped honey cells. Your kids can then use the bee workers, drones and queen from the dancing activity to move them around the hive magnetically with the little magnetic bee wand.

Honestly I’d count 7 activities in this kit as the book could be used as an activity alone. It’s much more than an instruction manual. There is so much detail and information in this booklet including more bee facts on the last page. Very impressive!

We also filled out a bee and a plant fact or opinion worksheet and talked about everything we learned today! You can download those worksheets by clicking the photo.

More Bees And Plants HERE!

And More Science HERE!