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Honey Be

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This lesson will help adult learners to identify honey bees, identify different types of honey bees in a hive, describe pollination process, interpret the importance of pollination and honey bees for pollination and gain knowledge about beekeeping. This will provide a business idea for them to pursue at the same type help conserve honey bee populations. In the long run this will help make food production sustainable. Several online and paper resources are available in this lesson. The mobile-based activities will enhance the learning experience. It will enable learners to access materials and recall and also perform an interesting assignment by taking photos. Only free mobile tools like Wix.com and Whatsapp are used.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Author: Shamila Janakiraman

Good Taste: Honey Bee Forager Preference

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In this 5 lesson set, students learn about the foraging behavior of bees and hypothesize if the bee’s behavior is related to its ability to detect sugar. Students will then determine which type of foraging bee would be best for pollination or honey production. Students will learn about the process of gel electrophoresis as a genetic tool and analyze DNA to identify strains of bees who are better pollen-collecting bees or better nectar-collecting bees.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Case Study

Author: Mary Burke Morrow

Climte Kids: A Bee Is More Than a Bug

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In addition to instructions for making a model bee out of polymer clay, this site also contains related information about bees: a fact list, factors that threaten them, suggestions on how to help them, a waggle dance diagram and video, and even bee metaphors used in our language. The Climate Kids website is a NASA education resource featuring articles, videos, images and games focused on the science of climate change.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Why Beehive Honeycombs Have a Hexagonal Shape

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Beavers are generally known as the engineers of the animal world. In fact the beaver is MIT's mascot! But honeybees might be better engineers than beavers! And in this lesson involving geometry in interesting ways, you'll see why! Honeybees, over time, have optimized the design of their beehives. Mathematicians can do no better. In this lesson, students will learn how to find the areas of shapes (triangles, squares, hexagons) in terms of the radius of a circle drawn inside of these shapes. They will also learn to compare those shapes to see which one is the most efficient for beehives. This lesson also discusses the three-dimensional shape of the honeycomb and shows how bees have optimized that in multiple dimensions. During classroom breaks, students will do active learning around the mathematics involved in this engineering expertise of honeybees. Students should be conversant in geometry, and a little calculus and differential equations would help, but not mandatory.

Material Type: Lecture

Author: Fatma Al-Qatani

Mosquitoes and Me

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Since 2016, the Urban Ecosystem Project (NIH-SEPA R25 GM129210) has been using entomological inquiry in out-of-school settings to engage historically-underserved upper-elementary youth and their educators from communities and schools in the urban core of Des Moines, Iowa USA.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Author: Katherine Richardson Bruna