Bees

The last few years that we have homeschooled, Lamb 1 was kindergarten age or older. I have read lots of books on science topics, but nothing was organized by topic. Last Monday I took some time to plan using The Well Trained Mind (I have the first edition although it has been updated since then) as my framework for science studies. We are going to begin by studying the animal kingdom. We spent a few days reading books about ladybugs. Now we are reading books about bees and wasps. Next we will study worms and after a few days working in the dirt in the garden the Lambs are looking forward to that!
We have a honey making plant in our town and a few years ago we took a tour. Sadly last fall the plant closed, but there is still a wax rendering plant open and we can still buy honey locally. I thought that I knew a lot about bees and honey making.
We have read a few books about bees and spent a long time on The Honey Makers by Gail Gibbons this week. We still have a few more books about bees to read. All these books were on our shelf, we didn't even need to go to the public library.
It is fascinating to me how God made bees and how the whole process of living, working, and making honey works for bees. I don't know how you could study bees and still not believe in creation! The history of beekeeping is also interesting how they got from wild beehives to the boxes bees are kept in now.
We are just getting a taste of learning about bees. We will probably spend about 2 weeks on bees and wasps. I know that we could spend much longer and still not learn everything about bees.
Studying bees this week reminded me why we homeschool and why we try to use a classical approach to our homeschool. The "grammar" of bees and the animal kingdom is fascinating and also fun to learn about! The Lambs have not asked a whole lot of questions about bees, but I can tell they are soaking all this information up like sponges. I wouldn't be surprised if they are bees in their pretend play in the next few weeks. Since the Lambs can't read these books independently yet, I get to share in the excitement of learning about bees too!