Bee Week

Last week at Blackmoor we had a week focusing on Science, for our topic in Year 2 we looked at Bees! On Monday we talked about bees and the children had lots of knowledge about bees already with many of them understanding that honey came from bees. To learn even more about bees we looked at some other different species of bees: red mason bees, ashy mining bees, white tailed bumblebees, red tailed bumblebees and honeybees. We looked at all the different features that we could use to identify these different species of bee. The children loved the bees we looked at, the red mason bee in particular! With the sunny weather we took our learning outside and completed a bee hunt, working in pairs or threes to find the bees we were studying and look a little bit about the types of places they liked to live. We found that red mason bees were called this because of their red colouring and their tendency to live in holes on buildings. Working in pairs, we had a lot of fun and got our science week off to a great start!

On Tuesday of our science week we looked again at the different species of bees we had found on our bee hunt and talked a bit more about their features. We had already found out that red mason bees were called this because of their colouring but we also found out that bees were either classed as colony or solitary bees depending on if they lived as a group or alone. We talked more about the bees that we liked and the features that we liked about them as we focused on talking about adaptation and how some bees had adapted to better suit their environment. To practice, we made a list of the features and then coloured bees like our favourite bees!

Wednesday we really dug deep into how honeybees looked and the different parts of the bee. Creating a diagram of the honeybee we labelled: the antenna, wings, compound eyes, thorax, legs, pollen basket and abdomen. The children were particularly interested by the pollen baskets, with many of them already knowing the term pollen from somewhere else. We discussed pollination and talked about the importance of flowers in the process of pollination. Like bees, flowers are different in certain ways to help their spread and growth. Flowers have adapted to become brighter and more colourful to attract more bees and help the pollination process. We looked at some native and non native flowers that bees absolutely love and then drew our favourite flowers!

Thursday we turned to the wings of a bee, and looked at flight. The children understood that bees flew from flower to flower during the pollination process but we weren’t too sure of how flight happened. The children knew the wings were involved but weren’t sure about how that happened. We discussed the 4 forces of flight: drag, thrust, lift and gravity/weight. To see this better, we looked at an experiment involving paper. There were 3 types of paper: a plain sheet of paper, a crumpled up piece of paper and a folded paper aeroplane. We conducted an experiment to see which piece of paper went furthest. After this, we all made paper aeroplanes and raced them against each other so we could see the effects of flight and how slight changes to the aeroplanes changed if they flew further or quicker.

After a whole week of science looking at bees, we decided to conduct another experiment. This experiment investigated the force of thrust and drag using balloons. The balloons were decorated by the children, including stripes and wings to change them into beelloons. We then attached the beelloons to a straw on a line and raced them by releasing the air inside. We predicted that the balloons that were heavier or with less air in them would travel less than balloons that weighed less or were bigger. When all of our work was done we collected all of that work that we did and made a display for our class so our children can see all of the fantastic work that they did this week. Well done everyone!