This week, as part of learning about Rosh HaShanah, the ELC had a bee incursion with Fiona Marantelli. Fiona is a Bee Keeper of five hives, and she engaged us with an interactive program. She showed us her uniform, the tools she would work with at her hives, and real bees in a hive. We even got to see the Queen Bee and looked through special lenses to give us an insight on how bees view their surroundings! When asked what they enjoyed most, they replied:

Putting on the bee eyes

Seeing the bees

Playing with the pretend fruits

At mat time, extending from our inquiry on what do beehives look like, the children were given a 12 Magnatiles and the task to build a beehive. It was wonderful seeing the children using their creative skills to build their beehive, with some displaying thinking flexibly when the bees did not originally fit in their hive.

Lisa Lu, Gan Seorah

Fiona the Bee-keeper joined us on Tuesday and she taught us so many interesting facts:

Girl bees are named worker bees

She has a pointy nose so she can put it Inside flower.

Male bee has big eyes – he flies so high looking for a young queen bee and doesn’t have a pointy nose as he doesn’t look for nectar.

Queen bee has pointy nose too, and can have 1000 eggs and babies a day.

Any worker bee can go grow up to be a queen bee if given/fed the right food.

After our recent inquiry into bees we already knew lots of these facts and we were able to teach Fiona a thing or two! Such as, there are 1600 bee types in Australia and only 3 types make honey.

Rivka Ash, Gan Gefen