Honey Bee Projects

• Honeybees are important pollinators and complex social creatures. honeybee image by siloto from Fotolia.com

  Honeybees are some of the most familiar insects, though often confused with similar looking creatures like bumblebees, wasps and various bee-like flies. They have long captured human attention for their production of honey, their complex social structure and their remarkable navigational abilities. In the early 21st century, they also made headlines for their widespread decline in many parts of the world, which is still only partly understood. Projects designed around honeybees can improve understanding of these fascinating and important organisms.

Pollination

• Many species of plants, both wild and cultivated, are pollinated by honeybees. honeybee image by Stephen Orsillo from Fotolia.com

  One good honeybee project is to make a list of local plants that owe much of their reproductive success to these insects. Honeybees are far from the only pollinators in the wild. There are many other kinds of bees in addition to pollinating butterflies, moths, beetles, bats, birds and other creatures. But honeybees are some of the most important pollinators, and they are unique in also being actively employed in commercial agriculture for that purpose. Some of the cultivated crops in the U.S. pollinated by honeybees include alfalfa, asparagus, carrots, almonds, blueberries, peaches and peppers.

Communication

• Another project could be diagramming one of the most intriguing aspects of honeybee behavior: the so-called "waggle dance," a coded routine the bees use to communicate foraging geography. A worker bee that has discovered a food source -- say, a patch of nectar-producing flowers -- will return to the hive and attempt to convey the route to the spot via a choreography of crawling loops and abdomen-wiggling. This "dance" typically occurs on a honeycomb in the interior of the hive, so the performance is on a vertical surface. "Up" signifies the position of the sun in real-time; the inclination of the "waggle" portion of the dance reveals the direction of travel. The dancing bee can suggest the distance required to reach the food source by the length of the waggling portion of the performance. For a project, a generalized version of the waggle dance can be drawn with the angle between "waggle run" and sun position identified.

Raising Honeybees

• People have been raising honeybees around the world for thousands of years. bee bees apises beehive hive insect image by Pali A from Fotolia.com

  For those wishing to really go in depth with bees -- and potentially produce honey for sale -- raising honeybees is an option to consider. Done within the proper legal framework, beekeeping can often be rewarding as either a hobby or a business. Either way you'll gain an up-close and personal respect for the operations of a honeybee hive and the insects' foraging behaviors. Be sure to check with your local zoning or agricultural agencies to determine whether beekeeping is prohibited or restricted in your area.