Beehive Stamping

Spring has sprung down here in Texas!

The azaleas are putting out their yearly show and our yard is exploding with white and pink azaleas.

With the blooming of all the flowers, comes the pollen and the bees (and allergies)!

It's absolutely perfect timing to start our Bees and Butterflies Unit from Mother Goose Time, 

our preschool homeschool curriculum.

I have to admit... I despise insects- especially flying ones.  However, as I have started reading more bee books to my preschooler and actually looking at the bees around me, I am slowly trying to appreciate them more.  I especially appreciate when they don't buzz to close to me! ;)

Here are a couple of pics of the bees in our yard this week as they flew from azalea to azalea:

Bumble bees, honey bees, and carpenter bees all make their way to our yard in the spring and summer.  I can handle the bumble and honey okay, but those carpenter bees are pretty territorial of our garbage can and shed... no bueno my friends... no bueno.  I have been known to look like a maniac a time or two ducking and running for the safety of our garage.

As the bees buzzed outside, we started our Bee Basics week with MGT, starting with their home.

Although bees can have different types of homes (hives, nests, or underground), we focused on a hive as we did our first Invitation to Create for for this unit.

MGT sent us the photo, yellow paper, and bubble wrap bag.  The Inspiration photo is truly inspirational!  Avaleigh stared at it for a loooong time and pointed to the larva in the hive showing me the babies and then asking me where the queen bee was.  She's into bees already!

We only had to add paint.  Although the pic above shows yellow paint, I did add some brown into the yellow to get the honey looking color you see below.

Avaleigh did not waste any time painting.  She used her bubble wrap bag like a mitten- stamping bubble imprints all over her paper creating the cells of a hive.  When she finished that, I asked her what she wanted to use to create her bees.  She asked for black paint.

I asked what she wanted to use to stamp her bees thinking she would ask for a paintbrush.

She surprised me and said she would use her fingers.

Which, by the way, were the perfect bee creating stamp.

The thing that impressed me the most as I watched her create her hive was the way in which she manipulated her fingers to stamp.  She was really trying out different parts of her finger to see what the effect was- something I had not really seen her think of before.

Her finished hive. 

I love how her bees turned out! Some of her fingerprints actually look like the head and abdomen of a bee! I also love the variety of bee shapes she made, some circular, some thick and solid black, others with a thick outer black ring with the yellow of the paper in the center.

Yeah....I'm going to frame this one.