This lesson plan and assessment takes you on a journey to discover if pollinators find your campus a hospitable home. Core compliant for Grades 3-5, but adaptable to all ages. Are you working with distance learners or in a non-traditional teaching environment? This lesson plan is perfect for you! All you need is a pencil and outdoor space, including sidewalks, local parks, greenways, libraries, and beyond!

Wrap your mind around the world, but without strawberries, watermelons, or chocolate. Humans rely on pollinators such as native bees, honey bees, butterflies, birds, and even flies for these and other important foods around the world. In our neighborhoods, pollinators are in trouble. This video link will support educators as they teach the Bee A Friend To Pollinators lesson plans, helping children become advocates for pollinator-friendly schools and community spaces.

Students will make observations of the behavior and life stages in flour beetles.

Every living thing must be able to reproduce and make offspring. Most of us are familiar with how humans and mammals make babies, but do all creatures reproduce in the same way? Do insects, like the beetle, give birth to little insects? Also in: French | Spanish

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Domesticated edible insects are a sustainable protein source that has been gaining global attention. P. brevitarsis is one such species, and their larvae can also eat decaying organic waste and turn it into a plant-growth promoting mixture. But organic matter like this is high in lignocellulose, which is difficult to digest. In fact, these larvae lack the enzymes needed to break lignocellulose down on their own. So, researchers checked their microbiome for microbial genes able to fill in the gaps. The researchers established a comprehensive reference catalog of gut microbial and host genes. Between the two sets of genes, lignocellulose-degrading enzymes were abundant and highly diversified. P. brevitarsis larvae also selectively enriched their microbiome for lignocellulose-degrading microbes and had physiological adaptations that assisted in lignocellulose degradation..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Roaming the forest floor, these army ants are doing what army ants do best: hunting insects to bring back to the colony. But they're not alone. The practice of gathering and consolidating enormous amounts of food has piqued the interest of other insects looking for an easy meal. It's a scene that plays out in most army ant communities; rarely are these colonies composed exclusively of ants, but often include numerous 'guest' species. A team of researchers from the US and Germany recently conducted a survey of these _guests_ in the tropical rainforest of Costa Rica. Using their morphological expertise and DNA sequence data, they were able to identify several new species of insects that had integrated themselves into the ant colonies. Among them, a hitch-hiking beetle disguised as an ant’s rear-end. Unlike most ants, army ants are nomadic. During their most active periods, the colony will move to a new nest site every day. This presents two difficult tasks for guest insects..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

The University of California's White Mountain Research Station provides science unprecedented access to unique environments, environments where life exists at the edge of extremes. This award- winning documentary weaves a story of how this unique access is yielding an understanding of change, from physiology to climate, from the oldest known living organism, to a short-lived beetle, and what this understanding means for all. (59 minutes)