Bees!

About a month ago Sayer asked me something about bees. I told her I didn't know the answer, but said we could look it up. I don't think we ever got around to it, but I remembered her interest. When we later sat down with the First Animal Encyclopedia to pick out a few critters to focus on for Life Sciences, bees made the list.

Most of the Applied Life Academy's (ALA) Netflix queue is history-related, but there is a fair amount of science-y stuff in there, too. And I bumped a DVD about honey bees to the top of the list. It came last week. Can't remember what day. We watched it. Bees are cool. Sayer had lots of questions.

At the library on Wednesday we wandered through the kid's section after working for a bit sorting books. I took them first to the non-fiction section, where Sayer picked up a book on cicadas. Right next to it on the shelf was a book on honey bees. Both came home with us. We read them both last night.

Yesterday was a wonderful day for being outside and doing yardwork. Not too sunny, not raining, very comfortable temperature - and the ground is very damp so weeds were easy to pull! And Sayer (and Duncan) were out there helping us, especially with the 'interesting' bits, like letting earthworms crawl around in our palms, and pulling snails and grubs out of the vegetation and 'disposing' of them (after which Sayer blew raspberries at them). And then I showed Sayer all the ants climbing around on the orange tree and we looked for scale infestations there. The orange tree has a mild case. Parts of the lemon tree are not so lucky. We saw several large scale insects, and lots of little ones with ants swarming all over, and lots of sooty black mold on the surrounding leaves. Time for a little bit of oil spray ... when the current set of rain storms ends.

So I guess we're on a bug tangent. I can see this leading to lots of investigations about other insects. Might have to go bump a few other DVDs up on the Netflix queue.