Bees

Watch these bee dance videos — "waggle dance" and "round dance." Imitate the bee dances for the waggle dance and the round dance. Learn which one is which.

Create a book about bees. Make a page showing the three kinds of bee jobs. Write about each job and how it helps the colony.

Hymenoptera includes bees, wasps, ants and sawflies. Make a chart to compare their similarities and differences. Or select two of these and make a Venn diagram. Use several sources to gather information.

Draw and label the anatomy of a bee. Describe the purpose of each body part.

Using a stencil pattern, trace hexagons to create a beehive matrix. Discuss the hexagon shape.

Check out how fast a bee can beat its wings. Count how many times a person can flap their arms in a minute. Measure several different people. Discuss the bee and compare it to a human's flapping ability.

According to the Bee fact page, a hive can have as many as 50,000 workers. Discuss how 50,000 could be represented in 1000s, or 100s, or even 10s. Use manipulatives to represent this quantity. Find additional numbers from this site to discuss in a similar manner.

Research how much honey can be produced from a hive in a given amount of time. Represent this in a visual graph using accurate size containers as necessary.

Examples of patterns could include that all animals need food in order to live and grow, and the different kinds of food needed by different types of animals. Animals obtain their food from plants or from other animals.

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land, and they live in places that have the things they need. Plants, animals, and their surroundings make up a system.

Things that people do can affect the world around them. People can reduce their effects on the land, water, air, and other living things.

Animals have body parts that capture and convey different kinds of information needed for growth and survival. Animals respond to these inputs with behaviors that help them survive. Different animals use their body parts in different ways to see, hear, grasp objects, protect themselves, move from place to place, and seek and take in food.

Individuals of the same kind of animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways. Young animals are very much, but not exactly like, their parents.

Plants depend on animals for pollination or to move their seeds around. Designs can be conveyed through sketches, drawings, or physical models. These representations are useful in communicating ideas for a problem's solutions to other people.

There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places on land. The emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

Being part of a group helps animals obtain food, defend themselves, and cope with changes. Groups may serve different functions and vary dramatically in size.

Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life: skeletal, circulatory, respiratory, muscular, digestive, etc.

Different sense receptors are specialized for particular kinds of information, which may be then processed by the animal's brain. Animals are able to use their perceptions and memories to guide their actions.

The energy released from food was once energy from the sun that was captured by plants in the chemical process that forms plant matter.

The food of almost any kind of animal can be traced back to plants. Organisms are related in food webs in which some animals eat plants for food and other animals eat the animals that eat plants. Decomposition eventually restores (recycles) some materials back to the soil. Organisms can survive only in environments in which their particular needs are met. A healthy ecosystem is one in which multiple species of different types are each able to meet their needs in a relatively stable web of life.

Changes in environments affect the organisms living there. When the environment changes, some organisms survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die.

Human activities in agriculture, industry, and everyday life have effects on the land, vegetation, streams, ocean, and populations of organisms. Individuals and communities are doing things to help protect Earth's resources and environments.

In multicellular animals, the body is a system of multiple interacting subsystems. These subsystems are groups of cells that work together to form tissues. Tissues form organs that are specialized for particular body functions.

Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors. In any ecosystem, organisms and populations with similar requirements for food, water, oxygen, or other resources may compete with each other for limited resources, access to which consequently constrains their growth and reproduction. Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources. Emphasis is on cause and effect relationships between resources and growth of individual organisms and the numbers of organisms in ecosystems during periods of abundant and scarce resources.

Predatory interactions may reduce the number of organisms or eliminate whole populations of organisms. Mutually beneficial interactions, in contrast, may become so interdependent that each organism requires the other for survival. Although the species involved in these competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments are shared. Emphasis is on predicting consistent patterns of interactions in different ecosystems in terms of the relationships among and between organisms.

Food webs are models that demonstrate how matter and energy is transferred between producers, consumers, and decomposers as the three groups interact within an ecosystem. Transfers of matter into and out of the physical environment occur at every level. The atoms that make up the organisms in an ecosystem are cycled repeatedly between the living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem.

Ecosystems are dynamic in nature; their characteristics can vary over time. Disruptions to any physical or biological component of an ecosystem can lead to shifts in its populations.

Biodiversity describes the variety of species found in Earth's ecosystems. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem's biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health. Changes in biodiversity can influence ecosystem services that humans rely on.

Natural selection leads to the predominance of certain traits in a population, and the suppression of others. Emphasis is on using concepts of natural selection in animals, such as overproduction of offspring, passage of time, variation in a population, selection of favorable traits, and heritability of traits.

In artificial selection, humans have the capacity to influence certain characteristics of organisms by selective breeding. One can choose desired parental traits determined by genes, which are then passed to offspring.

Human activities can positively and negatively influence the biosphere, sometimes altering natural habitats and ecosystems. Technology and engineering can potentially help us best manage natural resources as populations increase.  Examples of the design process include examining human interactions and designing feasible solutions that promote stewardship. Examples can include water usage (such as stream and river use, aquifer recharge, or dams and levee construction); land usage (such as urban development, agriculture, wetland benefits, stream reclamation, or fire restoration); and pollution (such as of the air, water, or land).