(cheerful music)
- Hi, I'm Miss Penny and we're at Sawgrass Nature Center
to find out about bees and how they make honey.
- Hi, I'm Kim, the bee lady.
I'm a beekeeper and I'm super excited to teach you
all about the bees and how they make honey.
- We're excited too, are you excited?
- [Kids] Yes!
- Are you ready to learn about bees
and how to make honey?
- [Kids] Yes!
- Me too, let's go!
(chimes ring)
(bubble pops)
(cheerful music)
- The honey bee having three separate segmented body parts
along with six legs is what makes it an insect.
The antennae are used to feel,
as well as kind of like a nose
with olfactory glands to smell.
Bees have two separate types of eyes.
Three ocelli and two compound eyes.
These different eyes can look in all different directions
so the bees can see really far
to see where those delicious flowers are located.
- Look at that, what is that long thing down there?
- This is the proboscis.
This is basically the tongue of the bee,
so it can stick it way down inside
the flower cups to get the nectar out.
The thorax is where the wings are located.
They beat their wings 190 times a second.
On the next segment, the abdomen is where,
the body portion that houses all of their organs are.
They have two separate stomachs.
One is a digestion stomach like we have,
where we get our food.
- Like our stomach, where's your stomach?
- But the other one is a honey stomach.
And they only put the nectar that's collected
into that honey stomach
so it can be mixed with enzymes
to create that delicious honey that we all love.
Over here they have a pollen basket.
They can fly really far with big bags of pollen on it.
Now also on the abdomen is where they have the stinger sack.
The thing that everybody fears about bees,
but bees will only use the stinger sack
when they are threatened.
The coolest thing about the bees' abdomen is
that they use their abdomen to make this crazy dance
called the bee dance.
By shaking their abdomen all around,
is how they're able to communicate to all the other bees,
where to find the delicious flowers.
- Miss Kim is a beekeeper,
so she's gonna show us what beekeepers wear
and the tools that they use to take care of the bees.
(chimes ring)
(bubble pops)
(cheerful music)
Now we have a beekeeper with us, Miss Kim,
and she is going to tell us
all about the materials and equipment that beekeepers need
and what they need to wear.
- This is a bee box.
This is where the bees live inside
once I rescue them and bring them home.
The bees will actually build their homes onto this.
So to be able to get inside here,
you have to use this hive tool.
When you go to pull out a frame,
there's always gonna be bees on it.
So you'll use this small little wire brush
to brush the bees down.
We also have other tools, like this.
This is a queen clip.
What you'll see right here, here's a picture of a queen.
Now see how much different she looks than the other bees?
See how long the back of her body is?
- She's the only one that lays eggs, right?
- Correct.
- How many eggs does she lay?
- She can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day.
- So she's all of their mom?
- Correct.
Another tool that we use is the smoker.
You would fill it with pine needles
and then light it with a lighter,
and when the smoke comes,
it disguises our smell so the bees
don't realize that we're not from there,
so they don't get too defensive when we come in.
- Now Miss Kim, let's learn about the beekeeper's outfit.
- So here's the bee suit.
This is a full body suit with a hood.
Hold it.
It's kind of heavy, huh?
So I'm gonna go ahead and put it on so you guys can see.
And then you have the gloves.
But this extra layer here,
because your arms are mostly what's inside
when you're working with the bees.
- We're almost ready to see the bees.
Are you ready?
- [Kids] Yeah!
- Are you sure?
- [Kids] Yeah!
- (laughs) All right.
- I'm ready, thank you Miss Kim.
- Of course.
(chimes ring)
(bubble pops)
(cheerful music)
- So we're talking about honeycombs
and they're very important to the bees.
- They build the actual hexagon combs,
they store food, they nurture the queen,
they fill those combs with either
bee bread, pollen, nectar, honey,
or the queen lays eggs in there
and then those hatch into babies.
- How many sides does it have if it's a hexagon?
- [Kids] Six!
- One, two, three, four, five, six.
We're gonna draw a hexagon
and turn it into a honeycomb.
Let's make a roof for the top of the honeycomb.
Now make a V at the bottom, not touching.
Now we're gonna connect the roof and the V
with lines on both sides.
Boom, you've got it!
So that's one honeycomb.
Let's make more because, look, they're all connected.
Do you want to see a real honeycomb?
- [Kids] Yeah!
- I think we can do that.
- All right.
- (gasps) Wow!
- What do you see?
- [Penny] I can see the bees.
- Can you hear them?
(bees buzzing)
What makes that sound, how do they make that sound?
- [Kids] With their wings!
- With their wings.
I see bees flying around, they see the light coming through,
I see sealed honey up here in the top,
see how it's capped over?
See how these little middle ones
look like different color than those?
Those are the brood, that's where the babies are stored.
And then when they're ready, they're gonna hatch out.
- I can see all the hexagons and
some of them are filled with honey.
- How about if we take some frames and extract the honey?
- That would be really exciting.
- [Kids] Yeah!
- Let's do that.
- All right.
- Okay, good, thank you.
(chimes ring)
(bubble pops)
(upbeat music)
Now we're about to learn about honey.
- So after all those days of flying miles and miles
and visiting hundreds of flowers every day,
they brought back the nectar.
They made the wax coating with their body
and they covered it,
and now it's ready
for us to extract it.
Well, what we first have to do
is we have to get the honey, the frame from the hive.
Now, we see how all the caps are wax-coated over here?
- Yes.
- So we use this little nifty tool.
We're gonna scrape, scrape, scrape away all this honey.
So now that the wax cap is scraped off,
we're gonna bring it down here
into the centrifuge extractor.
So now, how this works
is we have two of those frames inside of here,
and if you could help us first by spinning.
Who's ready to see it come out?
- [Kids] Me!
- One of the world's strongest antibiotics.
- [Penny] Look at that!
- Here, we have some natural honeycombs
that we extracted from a bee removal.
So inside here,
as we break it open and crush it,
the honey is just going to squeeze out.
- [Penny] Goodness.
- And come out like this.
- Thank you Sawgrass Nature Center
for giving us the opportunity to be here
to learn about bees and honey,
and thank you so much, Bee Lady.
- Thank you for having me.
I had a great time with you guys.
And from all your hard work in learning,
we're gonna take home the honey today.
- Woo!
- That we extracted from the hive
so you can enjoy it with your family.
- Bye, everyone!
- Bye!
- [Kids] Bye!
- Be good!