More on bees

Sayer has shown interest in bees over the last several weeks, so we've watched DVDs on them (including the Magic School Bus one that Duncan has been demanding that we get again) and read several books. And eaten honey and talked about how it's bee spit :)

We went for a walk on Wednesday and I totally forgot to mention the big buzzing sound I heard. Our route was just beginning to turn back toward home and I could hear it and couldn't decide if it was bees or if it was a noisy sprinkler system or something else. I'd just decided that it was sprinklers when we rounded a house and the noise became a clear buzz. No, make that BUZZ. I glanced around and saw them swarming in the backyard between two houses. Thousands of them!

I stopped us on the sidewalk and had Sayer listen until she was aware of the sound, then pointed out the swarm. Thanks to the video we'd watched (not the MSB one :) ) we knew that they were probably swarming because the old queen was leaving the hive after having laid eggs for a new queen, and half of the hive was going with her. We watched for a while, wondering aloud where the new hive might be. After a while we kept walking, talking about the bees. I was glad we'd seen it :)

This morning Sayer read a book about honey bees to me. She reminded me of the swarm we'd seen and we decided that it must have found a new home by now. She got to a page that discussed the fact that the hairs on the body of the bees collect pollen. Before reading the next page (which said something about moving pollen from one flower to another to help the flowers make seeds [given that they were introducing new vocabulary words I'm surprised it didn't say pollinate or pollination ...]), she looked up and said that when they move pollen from one flower to another it makes the flowers into a family.

Hmmm. I guess she gets that pollination leads to seeds leads to baby plants, and babies come from mommies and daddies, so they're a family ...