Buzzing Bees - Exploring Pollination

What To Do

1. Ask the students: "Have you every wondered how plants make new plants? Where do sees come from and how does fruit grow?"
2. Allow students time to answer and share their ideas.
3. Hand out Parts of a Flower worksheet and explain to the class what pollination means. 
   1. Pollination: process by which pollen is transferred from the anther male part to the stigma female part of a flowering plant, thereby enabling fertilization and reproduction. ** Can use flower and process of pollination diagrams provided to help with explanation.
4. As you go through the parts of the flower, have students follow along and label their own diagram.
5. Explain to students that they will be mimicking the process of pollination, by creating their own bees and flowers to pollinate.
6. Each student is given a flower and bumble bee to color in and cut out.
7. Students then glue on a Popsicle stick to the underside of their bumblebee and glue a cotton ball onto that for the "pollen" to stick to.
8. Glue a cupcake liner in the middle of each flower and fill it with yellow cake mix.
9. Have the kids dip their bees in the pollen and "fly" around the class pollinating each other's flower.
10. Ask them questions like: "What part of the plant do bees collect the pollen from? What part of the flower do the bees deposit the pollen onto?"
11. To help manage the students, give them instructions such as "Buzz over to a flower that has different colors than yours" or "Pollinate a flower that has purple on it."  For older students, you may select only a few bees to pollinate the flowers and time how long it takes them. Varying the amount of bees can be symbolic of decreasing population size and the effect that pesticides may have on the bee population, which leads into a more depth discussion about the importance of pollinators.