School Presentations can be lots of fun for both the beekeeper and the students. I try to have several hives that I have set aside just for that purpose when we head into winter. Observation hives can be stocked and last for quite a few days allowing several presentations to be done before the bees eat all the honey and the brood hatches out. Having a marked queen is an advantage because the kids all will want to see her. I have done a number of presentations at local schools and thought that I would pass on some of the things that seem to work out pretty well.
I talk first and show the bees last. Once the cover is off the observation hive it is pretty hard to shift the focus, so the role of pollination and food supplies is usually first on the list. A third of our food supply is related to the honeybee and the kids are pretty surprised that there is a relationship between the activity of the honeybee and the hamburger that they eat (alfalfa is a pollinated crop).
There is so much that can be tied to the goings on in a beehive that we see here in society and kids really like to see the connections. One of my favorites is talking about how the girls do all the work and the boys just sit around the hive and eat honey all day. The boys in the classes think this is pretty cool until they hear the story of the eviction of the drones. Teachers love this story because you can tie it to homework and work ethics.
Of course stings are always a hot topic of discussion. The gentleness of the honeybee is almost always compared to the attitude of the yellow jacket, which has no penalty for stinging. I try to get the point across that beekeeping is not dangerous and the bees sting only for a good reason. Children can understand that if you were being squished or if someone were wrecking your house you would have a good reason to sting them. I almost always try to do a little math with the children and use the USDA Bee lab findings of 7 stings per pound of body weight for a critical dose. This means way over a thousand stings for somebody like me, 700 for the average 5 th grader. I would have to just about roll around in a pile of bees to get that many.
I always try to conclude the bee presentations with a taste of honey from the comb. It is pretty easy to uncap half of a frame with a fork. I carry a package of plastic spoons to catch the surface honey without digging into the comb very deeply. One side of a frame can give a taste sample to an entire classroom.
I have a fact sheet that has a bunch of unrelated bee stuff written on it that kids can relate to and here are a few examples. I generally try to sprinkle these throughout the talk.
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Bees fly about 12 to 15 miles per hour, which is about as fast as a kid on a bicycle.
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It takes about 12 bees their entire lifetime to fill a teaspoon with honey.
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A good queen can lay 2,000 eggs in a day.
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A worker bee lives only about a month and a half in the summer because they wear themselves out gathering nectar for others.
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Bees only take naps for about 5 minutes at a stretch but they never sleep like we do.
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Bees talk to each other by smelling.
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Adult bees eat nectar and honey which is full of energy but has nothing to build muscles with. The baby bees need pollen for this.
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There are 56 to 60 thousand bees in a hive during the summer and almost all of them are sisters. There are only 4 to 5 hundred brothers.
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People have been getting honey for over 6000 years from bees and only about a hundred years ago did we figure out how to get the honey without wrecking the hive.
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Bees will fly up to a mile and a half from their home to find nectar and their navigation is so accurate that if you move the hive more than a couple of steps while they were gone they can't find it when they get back.
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Flowers all look different, smell different, and taste different. The flower flavors the honey.
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Red and black look the same to bees but they can see another purple that we can't.
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Honeybees visit about 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey