Honeybee Lapbook
Research and Templates by Ami
Photos contributed by Stephanie West

                                                           

Templates

Note:  It would be best to print the Vocabulary Fan & Lifecycle Wheel on cardstock.

    



Note about lapbook photos:  The Un-bee-lievable Facts were designed to fit in the cover book; however, you could let your student write his own books in the cover book and glue each bee separately (as shown in the pictures)

You may also want to include a bee diagram.
Here is a blank bee from Enchanted Learning.
Here is a labeled bee from Enchanted Learning.

More Fun
Bee Word Search

Inspiration ~ Pictures of Other Bee Lapbooks
Catholic Mommy
Joann's Bee Lapbook
Jamin's Bee Lapbook

Research

Three Types of Bees
1.  Queen
The queen is the largest of the three different types of bees.  She has a very long abdomen.  She uses her stinger to fight off other queen bees, and she can use it multiple times without dying.   The queen's main purpose in life is to make more bees, and she can lay up to 2,000 eggs each day!

2.  Drone
Drones are the male members of the hive.  They have a rounded abdomen, huge eyes, and powerful wings.  They do not have a stinger, wax secreting glands, or even a proboscis, so they must be fed by the workers.  They only purpose of a drone is to mate with a queen bee.  After mating, the drones die.

3.  Worker
Worker bees are females who keep the hive afloat.   They are the smallest of the three kinds of bee in the colony.  Workers have a long proboscis (tongue) in order to suck up nectar from flowers.  Their hind legs have stiff hairs that form pollen baskets.  They have a stinger but can only sting once.  When they sting, the barbs (like hooks) on the stinger gets stuck in the victim.  As this happens, the stinger is pulled out of the bee's body which kills the bee.

Has your student ever heard the expression "as busy as a bee?"  Well, that's because worker bees are busy!   Here are some of their responsibilities:
1.  Guard the entrance to the hive
2.  Clean the hive
3.  Build the comb
4.  Make honey
5.  Keep the hive cool (by fanning their wings)
6.  Tend to her majesty, the queen
7.  Feed the baby bees
8.  Collect pollen and nectar

After a worker bee has made about 400 flights to retrieve nectar and pollen, the muscles in her wings and legs are worn out.  She will fall to the ground and die.

Types of Bees Layer Book
Worker Bee's To-Do List
Worker Bee's To-Do List Blank

Bee Communication
Does your student know that some animals "talk" to each other with different kinds of smells?  Pheromones are chemicals that allow animals to do this.  Here are some of the messages that bees send each other with pheromones:
~I live in the same hive as you
~I don't know you
~I'm a worker
~I'm the queen
~Danger!
~Protect the hive!

Pheromones Circle Book
Circle Book Instructions

Finding Good Nectar
Bees communicate by dancing, too.  One kind of dance they do is the round dance.  This dance tells bees that a food source is near the hive.  The bee walks in a circle, then she turns around and goes the other way. 

Another dance bees do is the waggle dance.  This dance tells bees that a food source is far from the hive.  The waggle dance is done in different ways to show the other bees which direction they need to go to find the nectar.   The bee who found the source starts out by making a figure eight.  She waggles her body on the middle line.  If she waggles straight up, the other workers know they need to fly toward the sun.  If she waggles to the left, the other bees fly to the left of the sun.  If she waggles to the right, they head to the right of the sun. 

May I Have This Dance? Flap Book

From Nectar to Honey
Honeybees use the nectar they get from flowers to make honey.

1.  They use their proboscises like straws to suck the nectar out of the flowers and they store it in their honey stomachs.   Bees have two stomachs-- one used as a regular stomach and one used as the honey stomach which is a holding tank for the nectar.  Your student may like to think of it as a nectar backpack.  Honeybees must visit between 100 and 1500 flowers in order to fill the honey stomach which can hold 70 mg of nectar.
2.  The honeybees return to the hive and pass the nectar to other worker bees. These bees suck the nectar from the honeybee's stomach through their mouths.
3.  These house bees chew the nectar for about half an hour. During this time, the complex sugars in the nectar are broken into simple sugars.
4. The worker bees continue by spreading the nectar throughout the honeycombs where water evaporates from it.
5.  The bees make the nectar dry even faster by fanning it with their wings.
6.  Once the honey is gooey enough, the bees seal off the of the honeycomb with a plug of wax. The honey is stored until it is eaten.

Pollination
A bee's furry body carries pollen from flower to flower while she searches for nectar.  While she stops at a flower for nectar, some pollen from other flowers she's already visited will rub off.  This process, called pollination, helps the flowers make seeds which will grow into new plants.

Pollination File Folder

Nature Journal- Bee Observation
If the weather is right, take your student outside.  Find some flowers and observe them for at least 30 minutes.  Where are the honey bees?  Which flowers are the busiest?   You may want to repeat this exercise on another day at a different type.  Compare the results. 

Observation Cards & Pocket

Bee's Wax & Hive Construction
The wax for the hive is made inside the a bee's body.  It comes out through openings in the bee's abdomen; these are called wax glands. 
After the bee produces small flakes of wax, she uses her back and middle legs to pass the wax to her front legs.  She puts the wax in her mouth, chews on it, and shapes it into cells.  A cell is a chamber shaped like a hexagon.  The cells are used for three things:  bee eggs & larvae, honey storage, and pollen storage.  The bees have to make thousands of cells in order to create a comb. 

Hive Sweet Hive
Cell Tri-fold

Hive Robbers
Humans love honey and different animals do, too!  Some of the most common hive robbers are bears (who also want to eat the larvae), skunks, wasps, and bees from other hives.

Hive Robbers Petal Book

Lifecycle of a Honeybee
1.  A queen bee lays an egg in an empty cell in the comb.  It is a soft, white oval and is about the size of the dot over the letter i.  (That's little!)
2.  In just three days, a larva (like a worm) hatches from the egg.  It is fed by the worker bees and grows and grows.
3.  Seven days later, the larva stops eating.  It spins a silk cocoon covering.  Inside the cocoon, the pupa begins to develop.  It will grow legs, wings, and eyes.
4.  An adult bee chews its way out of the cell.

Lifecycle Wheel

Bee Senses
How do honeybees see?
With a compound eye which is an eye made up of thousands of tiny lenses that allow a honey bee to see ultraviolet light (humans can't see ultraviolet-- refer to Honey in a Hive for some pictures that will help explain this concept).

How do they smell?
Bees smell flowers with their antennae and with the pads on their feet.  The smell tells the bee if the nectar will make good honey.

Un-bee-lievable Facts
~In one year, a colony of bees eats between 120 and 200 pounds of honey.
~A honeybee would have to fly about 55,000 miles to find enough nectar to make one pound of honey.
~It would take a honeybee approximately 1,600 trips from the flower to the hive (and back) to produce one ounce of honey.
~Honeybees will fly up to 8 miles from their nest to find food.
~The brain of a worker bee is about the size of the head of a pin.
~A honeybee would have to visit 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey.
~A honeybee visits more than 2,000 flowers on a busy day.
~Honeybees are the only insect in the world that produces food for humans.
~Queen bees can lay up to 2,000 eggs in a day.  That averages out to one egg every 45 seconds!

Un-bee-lievable Facts
Cover Book

Bee Vocabulary
Beebread- a bitter yellowish brown pollen and nectar mixture stored in honeycomb cells; it is used by the honeybees as food
Brood- the eggs and larvae in the colony
Cell- a chamber shaped like a hexagon, built out of beeswax; cells are used for rearing the brood, storing pollen, and storing honey
Colony- a group of animals living together
Hive- home to a colony of bees
Nectar- a sweet liquid found in flowers and plants
Pollen- a fine powdery substance produced by the anthers of a flower
Royal jelly- a milky, yellow syrup that worker bees produce and feed to potential queen bees when they are larvae
Social insect- insects that work and live together in a community
Swarm- a great number of honeybees leaving together from a hive with a queen to start a new colony elsewhere
Pheromone-  chemical substance (as a scent) that is produced by an animal and serves as a signal to other individuals of the same species
Propolis- a sticky substance that bees collect from trees; they use it as glue to seal parts of the beehive which protects it from the weather
Proboscis -long, tube like tongue

Vocabulary Fan
Vocabulary Fan Blank

Note:  Choose only a few words for your younger student; a long list may overwhelm and cause him to lose interest in the lapbook.

Sources:
The Magic School Bus Inside a Bee Hive by Joanna Cole
Honey in a Hive by Anne Rockwell
Are you a Bee?  by Judy Allen
www.honey.com
www.enchantedlearning.com

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