Bee class!

We were invited to join an informal talk about bees at a local "pick your own" farm. We were happy to attend since we had just learned about bees in our science unit. Of course in our excitement to get there in time we arrived early. What could we do with all our free time? Pick some strawberries of course! The three of us managed to pick 11 pounds of strawberries in 15mins! Crazy! Even crazier was that those 11 pounds of berries only lasted 24 hours before they were all eaten. I swear I am raising fruit bats sometimes.

I will be honest I wasn't expecting a lot from the talk. I figured it would be a bit of information then a pitch to buy their honey. I couldn't have been more wrong. The talk was done by a professional bee keeper who was extremely knowledgeable about his profession. He was even wonderful with our children who were more than a little freaked out to be so close to bees.

We were able to see so many fascinating things. Such as these drone larvae, you can tell it is a drone by it's purple eyes. 

 Here is a queen bee egg case with a dead queen bee inside. It seems her sister emerged from her egg case first and killed her. There can only be one queen after all.

I am not going to lie and say the kids had a blast. It was hot and there were bees .......not really a trip to six flags for them. They did however get to see some amazing things that up to that point they had only read about in books. I learned quite a bit about bees and beekeeping and found the entire class fascinating. I of course flirted with the idea of taking up bee keeping as a hobby.....until I watched the bee keeper get stung multiple times while handing the hives. Yeah....I am good with buying my honey at the store!