Encountering Bees As A Person and A Parent:

For a long time, I was, dare I say, afraid of bees. It didn’t matter what kind they were either. If they buzzed like a bee, flew like a bee, stung like a bee… it was a bee. I generalized this species in the smallest place in my mind that I could, just to get past the idea of coexisting with them. 

By the time I had my own kids, I was hyper aware of the bee’s proximity, mostly because of the fear the medical field drove into me about being careful with all types of experiences. It also didn’t remotely help to know that my sister was allergic to bee stings and it could potentially be a genetic thing. Normal reasons, ya know?

It wasn’t until my son was about three when I realized that my concern was doubling down his efforts of being scared of them. I couldn’t have that, so I started challenging myself to talk to them like puppies. Being that I’d been around animals my whole life, I never really had a reason to fear them. Sure, there are a few that will remain nameless that I could really do without spending another moment with, but that will have to show up in another post. 

Puppies though. I talked to bees and wasps like puppies. It didn’t matter what kind it was, the name of the game was to eliminate fear in at least my party. My son would have to come to grips with his way at his own pace, but as for me, this was the most non-invasive thing I could do. 

Believe it or not, it began changing my responses to them. I started to notice behaviors as I put my own negative ones on hold. We’d stop and watch flight patterns, look up bees and wasps on the phone and, of course, I did a fair amount of research on my own about them while my son slept at night. 

By the time Covid shut everyone down, I was redoing a section of our yard, converting it into a clean garden that would lead into the woods. All of the extra dirt would go into our soon to be vegetable garden on the side of the house, and only more projects would quickly add themselves to that list after. Low and behold, Covid granted me a lot more outside time than my kids were completely willing to give. 

That meant a lot of decoding environmental changes, which included bug fly-byes. Any buzz was seen as a threat. All were given the best care in talking about the buzz, who done it, where it went and so forth. It happened so often that when the opportunity arose to talk about it, we slowed our day down to learn more about them. One in particular was a rather large, black wasp, called the Great Black Wasp. 

Many others had come and gone. All had gotten names to lighten the emotional combat load, but this one didn’t. I’m still not sure why. The relationship with this wasp and the research done on her to calm my kids’ down, was enough to settle them. We learned that they eat other bugs, like spiders, and sorry spiders, but my kids were all for that. For once, they were alright with having at least her around them. 

What’s even wilder is, with patience, we sort of started having a working relationship with her… after she sized me up, of course. This is a weird event for me. Our new wasp acquaintance flew up to eye level to look me in my eye, hovered there as if she was studying my features for threats, and even smelled my breath, while I stood there looking stupidly up at her. I say this because I was uneducated back when this happened. 

It was almost like being at one of the most important interviews of my life and hoping that the president of the company approved my hire. It was bizarre to give so much power to an insect that could sting the ever living business right out of me and not die from it the way honey bees do. After a long while, she went about her business, like I passed my assessment. 

As time passed, I came to find that a lot of bees and wasps do that. With research, I realized that some bees and wasps rely on what I readily gave and can store that for memory when conversing with the rest of the hive for up to an entire month. Going forward, this meant that any hive dwelling bee or wasp would have the ability to know you and your behavior. 

Knowing these things certainly changed the way I continued through my days as a “wannabe bee friend”. Let’s just say after years of trying, bees and wasps around our home relearn who I am and what kind of response they’ll have with me. So long as they do their job, I’ll be careful to do mine accordingly. 

Encountering Bees As A Teacher: 

All of these experiences brought me into last year, when I needed to come up with a series of preschool level activities to provide social skills among peers as they played. By the time the subject of bees came up, there was so much I wanted to teach about. 

My own journey prompted this. 

That and the need to share just how amazing bees and wasps were. 

However, the topic was about bees so this is where we’ll be doubling down in only the bee’s life. Since our guys were more movers and doers, games as well as cause and effect science became my main focus. 

I had everything from wearing blue tinted, huge sunglasses, lined with hole punched paper to give them a chance to see like a bee, to having to fill the honeycomb with matching alphabet slides in each comb. The idea was to help them try to slow down and look, which can be a challenge. 

Another activity was to use Honeycomb cereal and real honey to fill the honeycomb like little bees, provided the parents were alright with it.

I contemplated purchasing honeycomb so that our kids could explore what it was and see what they thought of it, however, after having it personally, I feel like the slight textures alone would have overwhelmed some of the students in our class, causing an issue with the overall experience. For those reasons, we chalked up the idea as a parent driven idea that they can decide on in the event that they would want to try it with their child. 

Then there were opportunities to pretend to be bees and collect yellow pom pom balls from the centers of silk flowers. For those not looking to break the bank on this, I found silk leis in the party aisle in Hobby Lobby for $2.99 that were well made. I bought three so that I could cut them from the necklace string and put them all over the classroom so that they had to forage for flowers like bees do. 

And another idea was to use a UV light to change the colors of flowers so that students could see what colors bees see on flowers instead of what we see. 

I had bee games galore, from “flight” checks, pretending to be a bee in an obstacle course made of hula hoops, to building their own honeycomb with recycled cardboard cup holders from fast food places on bulletin boards. There truly was a lot to discover and talk about.

We did wind up using paper pulp as a way to build our honeycomb on cardboard though, which was a surprising success with almost everyone in class. That one was fun. We made paper crowns with bee faces and antennae on them. Some kids were stoked just about that. Using the paper pulp helped them pretend to be bees with recycled material though, which essentially is what the bees are doing with honey to make the wax. For this project, I made sure to draw out the honeycomb on the cardboard so that they could build on top of that. It was a simple idea, allowing for almost errorless teaching.  

The more I thought about the facts, the more my list grew. 

From what I read last year, and please correct me if I’m wrong, the fully developed female worker bee who is in charge of the majority of the honeycomb creation lives for a little more than a month. She spends her first three weeks growing up. For about a week and a half she stays inside the hive, cleaning up and helping out. On the twelfth day she gets wax producing glands which help her focus on building the honeycomb. This means that by the time she’s a little more than a month old, she’s hustling to provide expansion of the honeycomb, food storage, and so forth. Remember what I said about only being alive for a month and a half? Well, when her wax producing hormones slow down, she’s expected to take on another job as a forager or leave the hive to start another one. 

Every time I think about this and the end of the summer season, especially, I can’t help but feel bad for them. These are the older bees trying to figure out where to be. To me it’s kind of like seeing someone’s grandmother or grandfather struggling to do something they’ve done their whole lives. I’ve found myself slowing down to accept honey bees instead of swat them away when they approach my car. I’ve been putting my palm up as a simple guide to let them know not to enter through my window, and more often than not, they land on my fingers, thankful for the rest. 

I’m in no way saying that grandparents are resting on my fingers, but think of those small moments when you hold open a door for someone else to go through instead of yourself. All of those tiny moments that might not mean anything to you but mean the world to someone else, that’s what I think of when I see them at the end of autumn. 

I read somewhere too that when bees are at the end of their lives, they’ll leave the hive and pass away by themselves. That was sad for me to read. I have to wonder if it’s something else to them and if honeybees have a culture that we can’t yet interpret. I wonder if they do it to avoid stressing out the other members of the hive or if there’s more to it.  

Reflection on My Personal Growth:

This dedication to bees took me years to navigate. My son was a toddler back then and now he’s borderline entering into his young adult phase. To say that this is an easy transition is hardly the case, especially when people are dealing with fear and consequence. 

All of my time, research, and devotion to educating all ages about what I’ve personally learned throughout this journey had me looking forward to one specific experience I mentioned above. Can you guess what it is? 

The more I watched videos and read about honeybees and their amazing life cycle, the more I found myself interested in honeycomb. Most of my engagement in this was to ultimately teach our students about it and why it’s just that amazing to keep talking about. As that interest developed, I began to crave what was just out of reach: the knowledge of what honeycomb itself tasted like. 

After watching plenty of reviews and knowing how the colony creates the honeycomb itself, let alone the time involved in creation, I found myself going back and forth about whether or not I could take that next step. 

Amazon was marginally helpful, letting me know the cost for the amount they’d sell me. It quickly lost its flare for being something I could share with our class as a sensory opportunity, on the price alone. For a long while, I put the idea up on a shelf, not expecting to come across a feasible possibility any time in the known future either. Being without the ability to contact a local hive for such goods, shoved the idea only further out of my mind, and so I hardly could believe my eyes when I found a one inch cubic square of the hexagonal gold staring at me in the fruit aisle of the local grocer. 

The price hit me soon after, but knowing it had been months of no known possibility of even trying it for myself to be able to communicate it to others as a good teacher would, I swallowed my budgeting pride and spent the seven dollars to satisfy yet another project’s completion. 

It was worth it. 

The satisfaction of even finding the tiny morsel was enough to make sure that it got to ride safely with the eggs, separated from my cart’s usual madness in the carriage below. Getting home and having the discipline to put the food away before having my golden experience was rough. I felt like a kid at Christmas, unable to wait another second to find out for myself if I’d like it or be put off by it. Either was fine… I just couldn’t wait to figure out what it would be for me. 

Opening the package held the same amount of excitement. I took pictures and reminded myself not to use a metal utensil as it would ruin the honey’s enzymes. So… my finger and thumb became my alternate. Crushing the first fragile piece had me mumbling curses, but it was all for nothing because as soon as it hit my pallet the busted honeycomb became a pure scientific extraction.

I analyzed the texture in ways that I’m sure others have all over the internet. My initial take was that it’s kind of got a near crispy texture to it but it’s soft as you bite down the hexagonal cylindrical form. It’s almost like biting into a really hollow or bubbly wafer. The morsel I had was about the size of my thumb if I felt the need to back out of this mission.

The truth is, I didn’t need to. Countless notes on other’s personal experiences enjoying a piece of the product of the hive, led me to believe that I was, in fact, missing out. They were right. If you’re looking for an experience that goes slightly beyond your comfort zone, this square inch of gold is a perfect place to start.

Now, before I get beekeepers and bee enthusiasts worried about over indulging, let me be specific about this. Beekeepers will only sell what the colony does not need to survive. It takes a significant amount of time and energy to make the honeycomb, which is not, in any way, something we as humans can reproduce on our own. Therefore, I support the cost of a minimal bite of pure golden bliss. Remember, their bees and their care for these incredible creatures are ultimately what you’re paying for. Be thankful that they do allow us to enjoy such a precious treat.

Bottom line? Bees are special. 

The more we attempt to learn about them, whether you’re doing it for you or for the need to teach a lesson for kids in your class, camp, or your own personal reasons, there are plenty of ways to explore them. 

There will be links to the ideas posted for bee inspired lesson plans and projects in the event that you’re looking for an activity in your class or otherwise soon. 

I hope my experiences have in some way inspired you to take a closer look into the lives of honey bees and wasps for that matter as well. I know I’ll be sharing more of mine as we go along. 

Thanks for reading!