Monday 27 May 2013

Bees

Today we saw lots and lots of bees. In fact, there was a swarm of bees right in our garden!

Bees are very important to farmers. They help pollinate lots of plants which helps the plants to survive.

In a hive there is one bee called the queen bee who is in charge of it all. A queen bee can't sting.  But some types of bee (the English native bee) are getting endangered and are soon to be extinct. I have signed a petition to help save bees. You can help save bees too by going to this website and learning what you can do. If the bees die out we will lose a third of our diet.



Our bee swarm was an unusual swarm because usually the bees hang on a branch or something suspended in the air. But our bees didn't have anything they held on to. Swarms are caused when a new queen has been born and the parent queen leaves the hive with her worker bees. When the queen comes out of her hive she goes away with the flying bees.

Our next door neighbours phoned a bee man who had a very good plan to get the bees. He got a box and a little brush. Then he sat down and waited. Gradually the bees swarmed to a different place and he scraped them into the box with a little brush. He scraped most of them in. He hoped that he had got the queen bee because without the queen bee the rest of the bees would think 'where's our queen?' and then they would go their separate ways looking for her.





The man said it was a small swarm and a usual swarm would usually be about 15,000 bees (about the size of a rugby ball). This one was about a thousand. I heard them in the box and it sounded more like water than the buzzing of bees.

I had great fun with the bees!


1 comment:

  1. What an interesting experience Bec. Now let me get this straight. You signed a petition on Sunday to save the bees. On Monday you went to the Botanic Garden and in the afternoon a thousand or so bees turned up in the back yard. Mmmm, seems like the word is out. Who knows, more bees might just come looking for your family of bee friends. Love Grandad

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