Bee Educated: Beepods Lessons for Educators

Published on August 25, 2020

Bee, Flowers and Pollen at Monticello (photo: Tony Fischer)

You have a Beepods membership, but are you really using all the resources? The Bee Educated section of beepods.com has ready-to-teach Beepods lessons that will spark your students’ curiosity.

Monarch Butterfly (photo: National Park Service)

Let’s Go Hunting

Around Wisconsin (Beepods HQ), fall is known for apples, pumpkins, Packers preseason, fall colors, and of course, hunting. While you probably aren’t going to take your students hunting, you can take them on a scavenger hunt. You don’t even need to plan a field trip. If you have some concrete-free land around your school, that’s good enough for this Beepods lesson. Doing remote learning? That works, too. In fact, it would be fun to compare what students found in their own yards. Simply print the scavenger hunt sheet, and then have them tag Beepods on your favorite social media platform to share their results. After the hunt is over, you might create a class graph to evaluate results or share results instantly with a site like Poll Everywhere. Discuss the importance of water, open soil, and pesticide-free areas.

Bee, Flowers and Pollen at Monticello (photo: Tony Fischer)

How a Bee Sees the World

As teachers, we need to remove obstacles in the paths of children’s learning. One of those obstacles is vision. According to the organization Prevent Blindness, one in four adolescents with vision problems in the U.S. do not have adequate access to vision correction services. Science teachers can get the conversation started by teaching a lesson about the human eye and then comparing that to bees’ vision. This Beepods lesson provides background and fun facts about bee vision as well as engaging videos and outdoor adventures. Students will love studying a male honey bee (drone) with a magnifying glass or analyzing a bar of comb in the Beepods Bee Viewer.

The Three Types of Honey Bees

After playing a round of disc golf with my Gen Y friend, I exclaimed, “Wow! I haven’t seen a Honda CRX in forever.” His response: “How do you know the names of cars?” I explained that my dad taught me to pay attention to cars and learn basic facts about them. The same can be said for honey bees. Unless we teach our students about them, they will forever just see bees as bees and not really see the unique differences between them. In this Beepods lesson, teachers have students speculate on the differences between drone, worker, and queen bees and then do research to see if they were right. The lesson cleverly guides students by requiring the use of specified keywords related to each type of bee.

Dissections on YouTube:

If you have junior high or high school students, YouTube can be a great resource for looking at dissections. Watch the videos ahead of time and prepare questions or diagrams to keep students focused on learning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82jyphxqoiY

Join college instructors as they dissect bees under a microscope. A great tool for teaching bee anatomy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP_2Yy3nyIQ

Very interesting video focusing on the honey stomach of the honey bee. Who knew scissors could be so small?

Dissection of a white-tailed bumblebee, (Bombus lucorum)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zgz3_0v_eY

Amazing video featuring the dissection of a white-tailed bumblebee that had a parasite living on it.

Get the most of your Beepods membership by tapping into the Beepods lessons. With a little modification, you can tailor them to suit the needs of your students. Don’t wait! Start planning today!

Resources:

https://www.beeculture.com/bees-see-matters/