What a buzzing month it has been. We have learnt all about pollination, bees and flowers. Pollinators are very important to our world and they are the reason we have food! Did you know, in some countries, people have to hand pollinate because they don’t have many insects left? They walk around with little paint brushes and pollinate all the flowers! We are very lucky to have so many pollinators in New Zealand.
We also learnt about the different parts of a flower and how they can be male, female or both!
We were very lucky to have Sylvana from Seaside Bees come and visit us. She brought in bees, showed us what a hive looks like on the inside and also brought lots of bee suits for us to try on and pretend to be bee keepers! She also taught us lots of facts about bees and answered all of our interesting questions. Here are some interesting facts we learnt about honey bees:
- Bees are attracted to flowers more for the smell they produce than the look of them
- Bees only sting when they are stressed. If one lands on you, stay still until it flies away
- Only female bees have stingers
- When bees are 12 days old, they are in charge of building honey comb – they only do this for about one week and then they are sent out of the hive to become a worker bee
- Queen bees lay 2000 eggs per day!
Thank you very much Sylvana. We loved every minute of your visit and many of us are definitely bee lovers now if we weren’t before!
We loved learning about flowers so much, that we decided to do some flower pressing to be ready for our Christmas cards in a few months. We collected flowers from around the school gardens and also Laura brought some in from her home. First, we dissected some of the flowers to see if we could identify the different parts, then we got to flower pressing. We cut the harder parts off, layered the flowers between baking paper and then stacked them in a heavy book. Fingers crossed they are ready for our Christmas Crafts.
Some kids were very creative and decided to use the natural dye from the flowers to make a rainbow of art"
This month we have also been working on building more beds with the wood we received from the old board walk at the Mount. Working with the fantastic Mr Webster, some kids learnt to saw and use a drill. We made a new sunflower bed and also one for kumara which we will plant out later. We then layered these beds with seaweed and left-over soil, and planted the sunflowers.
We have had an ABUNDANCE of radishes, peas and broad beans this month! We love the warm weather and how it is helping our plants to grow faster – it means we get to eat more – YUM!